What Is Hypnosis?
Updated: Nov 2
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Hello and welcome to the Hypnosis Show Podcast. I'm Robbie Spier Miller, your host, and today Scott McFall is joining us to answer your questions about hypnosis, such as: What is hypnosis really? Can I be hypnotized? Is hypnosis safe? Will I expose my secrets? Can I be made to do something that goes against my moral beliefs? An incredible hypnotist, Scott has built and sold seven hypnosis clinics across the US. He is also a masterful stage hypnotist and magician. His breadth and depth of hypnosis experience over 35 years and tens of thousands of clients shows in his client results and the success of his many students. Welcome, Scott.
Hi Robbie, how are you? Good. How about you? Fabulous.
Why don't you start by telling us how you first discovered hypnosis? Well, when I was a young person, I grew up in a family that did a lot of alternative care. I was born very premature. Spent time in the neonatal unit or whatever they called it in 1965 at the Mayo clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. I was brought there from Bismarck, North Dakota. And I had my first heart surgery to correct a coarctation of the aorta when I was 11. I also now have an artificial aortic valve and so on. So growing up, my father and my grandmother were students of the Harry Aarons Method of Hypnosis. And also, my father was a student of Dr. Thurman Fleet, who was an alternative care chiropractic physician who was very into mind attitude. The thoughts are things kind of concepts. So growing up when I was in the hospital, nurses would use various types of hypnosis and distraction to help with pain and so on. And I became very interested in it based upon, well, essentially escapism. I mean, I was, I was not feeling all that great at certain times and was overwhelmed either physically or going through the high blood pressure of those situations and whatnot, and hypnosis provided a way of chasing outcomes and sort of ignoring obstacles for a period of time as a kid. And some of that was fantastic. And some of it was more like having an attention issue, you know, because I wouldn't be paying attention to what I needed to be doing. But the basic idea is that I of course believed in the use of hypnosis and fixated attention because of the experiences I had as a kid.
And those experiences included noticing that you could get next to pain and have it sort of over here or, move it and sort of change your perception of pain. And that's where it began for me. Over the years, of course, I’ve done a lot more than just pain management. But yeah, there's that - one of the biggest reasons I was excited about it is I knew that it had helped me, well, feel better.
Great. And so when we look at hypnosis itself and sort of the mystery around it, and the amazing things that we can do with our minds, tell us a little bit about what you discovered from all your stage hypnosis experience and just observing what happened in that kind of environment that helped you with working with clinical clients.
Well, the thing that most clinicians have not experienced that stage hypnotists of any skillset do experience, is that in a stage hypnosis show, you're taking people through routine after routine after routine. So if you think about Al Krasner's concept of the ways that we used to test the depth of hypnosis, he called them convincers instead of depth tests. And that was a very good way of referring to it because the more we have said yes, the more that we have taken action on suggestions, essentially, the more likely we are to respond to the next suggestion. So what demonstrational hypnotists know that many clinicians do not know is that at the end of that hour show, responding to each and every suggestion, those people are much more responsive and profoundly more likely to show dramatic symptoms of hypnosis than someone in the clinic who's gone through a couple of little physical and emotional suggestions. And so they tend to be better at recognizing the symptoms of hypnosis. The hypnotic masking, eye flutter, fixated gaze, literal interpretation of suggestion, reddening of the scleras of the eyes. When frequently in a clinic, new clinicians could really use that kind of experience.
Certainly. Okay. And when you look at people who maybe are a little worried about losing control, when they see people up at a stage show and doing all kinds of wacky things, and they're worried that they're going to lose control or that they are going to reveal their secrets or that it's gonna change them somehow, what do you think is a useful way of looking, a more useful way looking at this?
Think about it like this. Life is a never ending experience of finding out how to surrender control. We don't have control over often, a lot of things in life, whether it's health challenges or health challenges of loved ones or the coming and going of people within our life.
And so, in a sense, we need to know when to apply ourselves, when to assert ourselves, what to fight for, for example. And we also need to know when to let go. I know it's trite, but think about it like the Serenity Prayer, you know, when to change the things you can and accept the things you cannot and the wisdom to know the difference. Hypnosis is a wonderful way to do what we could call directed meditation within the brain. It is very true that if you directly suggest something that a person would not do, normally they tend to just shake off the session. Now there's been a lot of research, even in the military. And that research demonstrates that really certain drugs are much more likely to make people do things they wouldn't normally do than hypnosis itself than hypnosis using relaxation, fixation, repetition. So when you're working with hypnosis, that trance reaction is directly dependent on the need of the client. If the client needs that relaxation, needs to let go, needs to forgive, needs to let go of stress, their response is going to be pretty profound. To fixate, let go, begin to learn a new way. When the person really kind of has it solved, their response to the - let's call it the trance symptoms per se, those symptoms go down and so forth.
So I think that there's a certain fear of losing control that can happen in relationships that can happen when we're trying to connect with people. So certainly hypnosis is sort of a metaphor or an analogous scenario for a certain type of maturity, hypnosis in a great hypnosis consultant's office. It's going to be done for an outcome, lose weight, quit smoking, quit biting your nails, pain management, forgiveness, sports improvement. So that individual, that person, they’re going to have a goal. They're going to have an outcome. They're going to know what is relevant to that outcome and not relevant to that outcome.
So certainly you get hypnotized every day. You drive into the driveway and you've been daydreaming. And you wonder what you've been doing the last eight, 10 blocks, or you hear a song from high school and your mind jumps to the memories of when you were in high school.
During these timeframes, your mind is definitely sorting by agreement. It's surrendering into a state of mind that isn't necessarily the one that the environment around you would suggest. And so in a sense, part of each day is in theta brainwaves, very suggestible, and it's a normal part of everyday life, in my opinion.
Now there are lots of theories on what hypnosis is. But really in a hypnosis consultant at an office point of view, it's inducing belief through suggestion to help a person take the appropriate actions for their outcome. It's inducing a belief through suggestion that causes the person to be highly likely to take the actions, to get their outcome.
And it's really that simple. The actions are where that success really lies and all hypnosis really is self hypnosis. The hypnotist is just someone taking you through the motions of doing it. So do you have any other question about that concept or idea?
So how I look at it is when we're using hypnosis to help us get outcomes, we actually have more control over our lives because when we're not using it, we're really, just repeating an old hypnotic trance that we started doing probably when we were a little kid and it's totally out of our awareness. So when we identify something we want to change and we get this kind of help and feedback that it actually gives us more control and more choice.
Many people in the NLP movement agree with your point of view and state that you're really there to get un-hypnotized from a routine that you had. And, certainly I understand that point of view and agree with you, and it helps that client to understand their inner routine that they may want to change.
But I think that there's also some incredible wisdom in the idea that all change works based upon the stages of grief. So the person is in denial, then they're angry that they have to change something. Then they're debating on pieces of it. Then they're sad. And then they're finally in acceptance. So some of the time just getting that person to surrender into acceptance of what's going on and the need to adapt is a huge point in itself.
So I agree with the idea that technically they’re there to get un-hypnotized from a routine that isn't working. And I still think there's some incredible healing in the idea of knowing when to let go when it's safe to let go.
Right. So what you're saying is that the experience itself is healing. It can be, it helps you become more flexible. It's a growing experience in and of itself. Right?
Right. Think about the modern world and the amount of change that's happening. It tends to make the entire population relatively speaking, hyper-vigilant, hyper-intense. Eventually that does change everything from adrenaline to cortisol to the way your body is producing or eating up its own hormones and so forth.
So yes, knowing how to let loose, knowing when to relax, knowing how to control your thoughts, meaning whether you're picturing things or talking to yourself in your head. All of the various skills and disciplines of hypnosis are more necessary now than ever, certainly.
And when you go see a skilled hypnotist who has good intentions, then their focus is going to be on the client's outcome. And so that helps to keep you safe because we're focusing on what you actually want to change in your life.
Well, keep in mind that most modern hypnotists work - whether they're online or in an office - with video and audio recordings of everything that takes place. And they do that for the safety of the client and the hypnotist. And that's kept in a confidential video record. Sometimes they're used for training purposes, if the client has signed a release to do so. But what a lot of people don't know about hypnosis is that the details of what happened aren't really the way that hypnosis helps people change. A way to put it is a knowledge of content is not required in order to facilitate behaviour change. The details of what happened are not actually how a person adapts to chase what they need to do next, or to heal or to let go, or to forgive. The details of what happened aren't really what helps them to change. And often the details and dramas of what people think happened are how children manipulate their world to create enough drama that they technically don't have to mind anyone. So it's important to have an outcome or a goal for the future. And hypnosis really helps people to do that rather than keep a forensic reaction redundantly to what has happened so far.
And so we're looking at what needs to happen next. And we look at things in terms of big picture archetypes or patterns and people, and the whole human experience in a big picture way. And so it's really not necessary to share any secrets of what might've happened in the past.
Yeah. And sometimes, you know, you need to understand the general idea, but I think what I'm saying is that it's not as though there's all kinds of secrets on those videos in the record. That's what I'm really saying, because the method is very different than say traditional counselling or psychotherapy, which has a different set of theories and approaches, which, you know, there are times that people really need to be referred from a consulting hypnotist to a psychiatrist, psychologist, various other professionals and medical doctors. There is a limit to the scope of practice of the theory that we're talking about, obviously.
Yeah. And tell us a little bit about the role of regression in what we do. And I know at least where I'm from, there are many, many people who are quite fascinated with regression or past life regression, and often when they come to me as students, that is actually what they're hoping to learn in the first place. Share with us, at the Master Hypnotist Society, what our view is on that particular technique, in terms of helping people.
Well, boy, it just breaks my heart that so many people are caught up in that, but it's human nature because it's like a soap opera or watching true crime dramas. So to give a foundation of how we see this, let's talk about the Satir model for a minute. I understand that this is a very controversial topic, because a lot of hypnotists see this very different than how we do it. So I'll do my best to help to make the case for how we go about reframing the past, as opposed to regression, keeping in mind that I was once a student of Irene Hickman. It's not like I haven't had extreme experience in the regression area, but I'm going to, I'm going to suggest a different way to look at it. Opinions vary. But this is how we tend to frame it. So the first thing to keep in mind is that most people, when they're looking for regression are looking for cause and effect relationships that have something to do with blame. Regression is the most likely thing to get a hypnotist sued, and regression can, in fact, create false memory or set up someone to find a reason why they are the way they are and label themselves that way instead of change.
So we tend, if we're doing things like reframing the past, to look at it more like the concept of timeline reframing in Neuro-Linguistics, or the Dickens pattern, and using techniques that are generalized rather than the details of the soap opera that we tend to get sucked into in people's lives.
Now I've worked, in the years that I was doing regression, on cases that were legal. And I've worked on cases that were profound in what was taking place with folks. And so the only place that direct regression with extreme amounts of content would make any sense is forensic hypnosis. Forensic hypnosis isn't even allowed in many states in courts, it is admissible and others. And I've done a little of that in the eighties and early nineties.
However, When you're talking about changing someone, helping them to change, helping them, then the end result of anything that you're going through to balance them out would be wisdom and forgiveness. The point of it would be getting the wisdom from the experience and then having the experience forgiven or let go of, and not tarnishing their labeling of themselves or others in the present. And then it would need to also be relevant in terms of what is it that they need as a skill out in the future. What actions do they need to take in the future? So, goal number one is avoiding the concept of blame and deflection by accidentally giving a false cause and effect relationship between the past and the present. Goal number two is having the person level with themselves about what they control and how blame works in their head. Teaching the Satir model to the client is very important as a foundation before this even starts, where they understand blaming, placating, computing, distracting - blaming, placating, computing, distracting. The idea that they can level with themselves.
Now. Whether we're reframing that past experience by showing them the limited model of the world, of the people around them, where they're able to forgive, we would then go into a structure that's very similar to Hawaiian Huna, or Pono Pono. That structure of Ho Opono Pono gives you a way to have the client visualize what forgiveness looks like within the brain.
And so as you have this process of generalized forgiveness taking place, and you have this process of the freedom within their beliefs to acquire whichever skill or actions or resources that they happen to need, we're now in a process where this person's flexibility has been increased. So they're not thinking about their identity like they're a permanent adolescent.
You know, one of the questions I would ask is do most of the well adjusted adults you know have an extreme identity oriented fixation, or are they doing their life and having activities and able to focus on other people than themselves. Or are they completely caught up in the past and this happened to me.
So we need to see that victimization as a concept within the brain is a fixating compulsion. A compulsion is anytime you associate pleasure and pain with the same thing. Well, victimization has both the relief from blame and the pain associated with the victimization. So it becomes a circle away from the pain and toward the pleasure.
It's like looking at something sparkly from a feelings point of view. So knowing that, it becomes important as a hypnotist to reframe or to assist in the reinterpreting in the same way that Charles Dickens did with the Christmas past, present and future concept. And in the book that was all consequence driven. In real life, in a hypnosis session, it has to be reward and success driven with an understanding of the consequences. If the actions are not taken, and we’re just finding a cause and effect relationship from the past, it is not healing in itself. And even when Hickman did what she did with regard to Mind Probe and whatnot, remember those sessions were eight, 10 hours long sometimes, and she would be taking people through it until they have the wisdom.
Dick Sutphen used to say wisdom trumps karma. And so the thing that you got here with this, us being fascinated with the soap opera of what happened in the past, where we're wanting to be the saviours of these people, that is not healthy for the hypnotist. We don't want the hypnotist to be the Messiah martyrs.
Secondly, we don't want the client to believe well, of course, I'm this way, this happened. We need there to be three to five different ways of interpreting how to move forward in a useful and powerful way. And that isn't what happens when they nail down a cause and effect relationship that they start to think of as part of their identity.
So are we giving resources or are we giving reasons why the problem is there? And I think that we at Master Hypnotist Society have seen different outcomes, different results, and different enthusiasm from an approach that recognizes this, that reframes this from the screening. And, that's how I see it.
I believe we need to be outcome-oriented. I believe that we need to be forgiveness oriented. I think things need to stay more general than most folks think about it. And, and I, to some degree, think that's consistent with Erickson and a few others as well.
So it's really, the experience is helping people discover that they can see things totally differently and that they can stand back and look at the big picture and appreciate their outcomes from a different point of view and recognize when what they're doing is actually getting in the way of their outcomes and learning how they can change that themselves. Instead of thinking it's about circumstances.
Well, I would caution against thinking that it's really reason based. I think it's more like scope based. A great analogy is if you're landing a plane and you're staring straight off the nose of the airplane, when you're coming in, you're not seeing enough of the runway to have scope.
And what will tend to happen is the person will fly and hit the nose wheel, or the prop instead of rounding out and flaring the plane. You're supposed to look three quarters of the way down the runway. Well, once people have these problems and fixate away from the problem, and trying to fix the problem, they're not looking at their general life three-quarters of the way down the runway and having scope on what they need to have happen. They're fixated on that spot itself or the things right around that spot. So frequently, yes, letting loose and getting scope and intuition is a big part of how hypnosis helps people.
Great. And talk a little bit about the role of biochemistry and all of this and how, when we go into a state of hypnosis, it actually physically helps our body change so that we can have a bigger scope.
Well, I think about it like this, if you're running from a lion in the jungle, that's all you're thinking about. If there was an elephant standing on your foot, you’re not really thinking about other things while the elephant is standing on your foot. So we say that there are two propelling systems away from pain and towards pleasure. So you can think about it like away from problems and toward solutions or joy or pleasure or whatever.
So then you've got the identity in there, but your biochemistry is going to change. If you're running from a problem, you're going to get hyper-vigilant. You're going to be fixated and the chemicals in your body are literally going to fixate on fight, flee or freeze. Whereas if you have the consequences a little bit, but you're emotionally chasing the outcome, your biochemistry is going to give you possibility in the sense that, that urgency from, you know, adrenaline, cortisol, yada yada, blood pressure, all that's going to calm down and you're going to be able to see a variety of options. Possibilities. So it's state dependent memory and you’re accessing state dependent resources. So let's say you are drinking a ton of coffee while you're studying for a test and you don't have any coffee when you take the test. Well, you'd have a harder time remembering because your brain chemistry isn't going to match when you were learning it.
So there are all kinds of substances that are like this. Everyone understands what a blackout is when someone has had too much to drink yet often they have not been educated in the subtlety of how different moods change that brain chemistry. And you don't always have access to all of your talents or your skills or your abilities if your mood changes. So frequently, as you're doing hypnosis, as you're learning state of mind acquisition, you are impacting directly what the brain chemistry is, which neurotransmitters are involved and making it more likely to have a greater freedom of choice in the long run, actually.
And of course, I, I leave the specifics of that to our medical advisor. Usually Dr. Burks, he usually talks about the specifics of it. And it's, it's really frequent that we have clients either in the clinic, or at a stage hypnosis show, who by the time they're done, they've never been so relaxed in their whole life. And they are seeing things totally differently as a result of the experience.
Well, there's a very specific reason for that as well, you know? And that's because when someone gets stressed and they stay stressed for a long time, this starts to feel normal. And then if they get a little more stressed after a while, this starts to feel normal.
So the two things that I've been involved with where they're just shocked because they actually go all the way back to par is when I was in massage therapy and hypnosis where, it just boggles their mind that they finally are like, you know, loosey goosey and okay. You know, and that, that is a powerful experience.
And it's, it's sort of like, although most of the time I refer the people who are coming in for things like direct addiction to specific addiction counsellors, and licensed track people in our group, a lot of the premier addiction facilities now use these types of techniques to get people to where they're not in that need to self-medicate to get back down to where they're not as stressed as they were.
So there's a lot of joy and power in knowing how to get back to par, to get the arrows pulled out and heal up and relax and get yourself where you're finally in between the pressures. That's certainly true.
And so when we look at people who are coming for help and they have an outcome, often people are stuck and they've maybe tried a lot of other things already to help themselves and they haven't succeeded. And they're really in a situation where either they come for help and get help with hypnosis or they're stuck with their problem forever. Talk a little bit about how we can help. We can use that situation to help the the person make this a really powerful experience for themselves.
Well, I think that one of the most important points is that some folks have habit of failure. Like some of the time they just don't think that anybody understands them. I think it's this, this cultural thing that we've created that everybody's so unique. It has made it difficult for people to notice when their problem is archetypical, where it's a typical thing that people go through with maturity. You know, when people find out there is no Santa and there is no Easter bunny, you know, perhaps that's a disillusionment and maybe in the modern world, people are not very good at when their illusions fall. They stay in irritation or they stay in resentment instead of getting all the way to acceptance and totally adapting and finding a happy spot.
So sometimes this has to do with relationships. You remember the case that we talk about in training of the woman who was about 67 years old and came into my office and she told me her husband died and she was sobbing. And she was with her daughter, and being the guy that I was at the time, I was still a relatively naive young man. And I, uh, it was like a half an hour before it occurred to me to ask when he died. And I was a little weirded out because the whole time the daughter was rolling her eyes as her mom was talking, I thought it was weird. And then the woman said, well, he died 27 years ago. And I looked at the daughter and the daughter went, you know, this woman had been to many, many counsellors, many, many grief specialists, clergy, every kind of person. And I just got lucky. It wasn't particularly anything on my part. I just happened to have been reading a book, that had a concept in it. And I said to her, in order to be a good person, how long is it appropriate to grieve? And she said, I don't know, And I said, well, that's clear. I said, uh, like 10 minutes? No. Like day? No. Like a week? No. How about 27 years? And she said, it seems kind of long. And even though I did five sessions with her, the belief that was in the way is in order to be a good person, I must grieve. There's another belief in the way that in order to be a good person. I must only love that guy. In other words, she wasn't free to replace him. That went on for 27 years. Now, what happens to this client is all of a sudden sympathy seems like love because she's getting sympathy from family members. She's getting sympathy from all over the place. And the nervous system starts to think the sympathy is love. Not that love is love, but that sympathy is love.
And so you end up with instead of a need for love or a need for acceptance, you end up with a need for sympathy. Well, this is an epidemic, this need for sympathy is an epidemic. This confusion that sympathy and love are the same thing as an epidemic. And so when clients come in, who've been to a lot of other folks who are very well-meaning and sometimes have really done good things for them, the reason that the client is not changing is that their need has changed from a solution to this need for sympathy. That's one reason, there are others, of course, but it's a very difficult job to teach young hypnotists or therapists of any kind or clergy, how to give empathy and consideration, without accidentally getting sucked into a sympathetic position.
So the other issue with these people is that they think they're so different, they're really proving themselves. Right. See, it had to be this way. They don't know that they're doing that. Some of them do. So the question is how to prove through the actions that happen during the session, how to prove through the actual evidence that is in front of them and have them actually receptive to that evidence.
And that's what that fixation, relaxation, repetition, and being in a different pattern and environment gives a unique opportunity to make points that were just bouncing off that individual at other times.
So this common belief in the self-help industry or in the health industry is that everybody has everything they need inside them in the first place. And we really look at things quite differently because we see that people actually do need feedback. They need to have a different frame put around what they're doing, or a pattern interruption. And sometimes people who look at hypnosis as rapport, even though it is a very important part of hypnosis, have a hard time wrapping their mind around this because sometimes we really need to break rapport to get a point across or to get them to, to shake things up enough, to see things differently.
Well, yeah. Think about it like this. What's inside of us is like organs and pus and brain matter and goo and blood, what's inside of us is not answers. You know, the answers are literally all around us and they are perceived with our senses from outside of us, whether it's emulating another person or rehearsing. The best way to change in the world is rehearsing the new way you want to do it over and over again.
And so this misconception that we're proving ourselves permanently, like we're permanently adolescent. It's, it's very unfortunate that that entire concept has happened. And it's, it has a point that's this big, that belongs in the lexicon somewhere that is somehow become this big. So, Will Horton changed the presupposition in NLP of everyone has all the resources they need in order to change to everyone either has them or that they can get them. And that's the way he expresses it.
I think the way that I see it is that everything is learning and this hypnosis or NLP or reframing or forgiveness frequently, it's just learning. I know we want to make it all, you know, woo, woo. But sometimes it's just learning something.
So one of the things that we talk about in terms of our philosophy of helping people is that sometimes when you're in the bottle, you can't read the label. So as the hypnotist, we have that outside point of view and our role is to be able to see where the person's at and see where their outcome is and what do they need to, how do they need to change, or what resources do they need to develop to actually get that outcome and to be their guide through that process.
So talk a little bit about that.
Modelling self is a classic NLP skill that weirdly almost nobody learns in NLP. I don't know why that is. Um, it's not like it's not covered. It's not like the little pods that people work in don't have an objective position and two people doing the techniques where you're supposed to be switching and getting in an objective observer position.
So the idea is that you're learning to step out of yourself. And look back at you without any fear of shame and then decide whether the patterns and activities you're watching match your outcome or don't match your outcome. Well, sometimes, you know, there's a movie, An Officer And A Gentleman, where the drill sergeant chooses to keep using Mayo’s fear as the teaching tool. He's telling him you're not enough, you know, you don't belong here and he's trying to break him. You know, the thing is that, Mayo, his character, eventually when he's getting hassled, you know, the guy's going, why don't you drop out? Why don't you just quit? Why don't you drop out? And, Mayo says I got nowhere else to go. Well, in that moment, that character is at acceptance of that he really has to make it work. So Mayo was in denial and then he was angry and then he was angry at his dad at the beginning of the film. And then he's only accepting part of it. And then he's sad that he's going through it. And he's finally at acceptance.
So getting somebody into acceptance of that they need the skill of being able to step out into the objective position about themselves. That's one step. The second step is to be able to method act the other people around them and feel what's going on with them. So the first skill would be, I can actually see myself objectively, which many people cannot.
And let's say more objectively. Cause totally objectively, probably crap. Probably no one can do that, but you can step out in an objective position as long as you're not afraid of shame and either decide to appreciate or change what's going on. So these skills are general skills that help you to be able to shift the way you see the past, shift the way you see the future, be able to emulate a situation with someone else without feeling like you're going to lose yourself.
And those skills are generalized things that are being sort of taught overtly and covertly throughout the process of learning. So we start as the hypnotist, helping people see this, and then the goal is for eventually them to learn how to see it for themselves. Yes. The idea is to make ourselves obsolete on the topics that were taught.
And if they're doing any other session work or they're doing another program with us later, it's because it should be on a totally separate thing in many ways, or skillsets that help with something else because we should be breeding independence and then intra-dependence rather than dependence. And many of the clients will really be trying to make dependence happen again to avoid blame. So we're going, you know, independent and then intra-dependent, where they can cooperate and do wonderful things standing on their solid independence. So yeah, we, we need to become, what they needed to learn from us needs to become, obsolete and self-generated, before we move to the next thing.
There's old wine in a new bottle. Everybody likes to change the name of stuff. The guy who created the word hypnosis, he wanted to change it to monoideism later cause he realized it didn't really have anything to do with sleep per se. So he thought of it as fixated attention for a period of time. Over the years, I think we've learned that it has more to do with sometimes getting someone to have general attention. Sometimes the skill they need is to be able to calmly look at everything at once without being overwhelmed and then pick the most important thing to do in sequence. Sometimes they really do need to let the rest of the world drop away and know how to fixate their attention for a period of time, to have an obsessed desire to get an end result.
But I think that flexibility and choice is really the whole point of doing a hypnosis program. And these days, people need those more than ever with the amount of stress out there and the amount of change that we're having to deal with these days, this skill is becoming even more important for people.
When I was growing up, autonomy was the point. Now it's almost like fear is being used to create more and more desire for dependency. The ecology of each person's life dictates what it is they're asking for. And, and as a hypnotist or as a neuro-linguist, your first real issue is, is this in my scope of practice or should I refer this out?
But yes, right now people do need tools. They need to know how to run their own head, their own heart, and their own outcomes in a world that is changing very fast. That is certainly true.
When clients are thinking about going to a hypnotist, what should they be looking for?
Hopefully they have a lot of reviews or testimonials or endorsements that you can read. Where it's really just past clients telling you how they did great, because the roadmap for the attitudes and values to get your goal are probably right there in the story of that person who already succeeded. The checklist is probably right in there. And so wherever you learn what you need, you know, just be open, open to getting it, you know?
Well, you and I both knew a guy named Yarnell. And his comment was thought without action is simply irrational thought. Deepak Chopra: It is not enough to know. It's only enough to know and do. Tony Robbins: The magic is in the actions you take. But you know, that Russell and I had a very contentious relationship and I would just mention that I love that slogan: thought without action is simply irrational thought. It's a really great way to sort of trap you into saying do it or it doesn't exist.
Scott, just share with people how people can get in touch with you. If they would like more information.
You know, you can always go to hypnosisconnection.com and use the phone numbers there or connect on any of the social media platforms. We're on all of them. Love to hear from you.
Join us for next week's podcast, where you will get to hear from psychologist, Dr. Daniel Bureau unsatisfied with the results he was getting from traditional psychology. Dan has spent many years traveling the world over, looking for better ways to help people heal and change.
He will be giving us a sneak peek of his soon to be released book, A Bigger Picture, where he shares his discoveries about how the amazing power of hypnosis helped him finally heal himself.
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