A session can go perfectly and the client can still walk out believing it failed. In this episode of the Brain Software Podcast, Mike Mandel and Chris Thompson work through the things that go wrong during and after hypnosis, and arrive at an uncomfortable conclusion: almost every one of them was decided before the induction started. The client opening their eyes, the doubt loop afterward, the phone call three days later that says it didn’t work. None of those are technique failures. They are expectation failures, and the pre-frame is where you prevent them.

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The post When a Client Says Hypnosis Didn’t Work appeared first on Mike Mandel Hypnosis.

Grief is the one thing on this show that everyone listening will go through, and most of us are handed no tools for it at all. In this episode of the Brain Software Podcast, Mike Mandel and Chris Thompson set the usual comedy aside and talk about what grief actually does to a person, and what you can do about it. Mike treated grief professionally for seven years, and he has been flattened by it more than once. Both show up here, along with three techniques you can use on yourself tonight.

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When you move, you break the trance.
My wife said that to me recently, and the more I thought about it, the more interesting the idea became.

Most of us don’t realize just how hypnotic ordinary life can become because we get used to the same rooms, the same routes, the same people, the same routines and the same little decisions that hardly feel like decisions anymore. There’s nothing wrong with familiarity, of course, and in many ways it makes life easier, but it also means that huge parts of our day can begin to run automatically without us really noticing them.

We get up in the same place, make coffee or tea in the same kitchen, sit in the same chair, drive the same roads and look at the same surroundings. After a while, we stop seeing much of it properly because the brain is very good at deciding what no longer requires our full attention. It simply becomes background.

We know where everything is, we know what comes next, and we move through the day with an enormous amount of behaviour running almost by itself. In that sense, ordinary life really can become a kind of trance, not because we’re literally asleep or unaware, but because so much of our experience has become predictable.

Then something changes dramatically, and suddenly the trance is interrupted.

Moving house is a perfect example because almost everything that used to happen automatically has to be reconsidered. You don’t know exactly where things are. You have to think about which road to take, where the shops are, how the rooms feel at different times of the day, and where you’re going to put things that used to have a permanent place. Even trivial decisions become conscious again because the old cues are gone, and that changes the quality of your attention.

For a while, you begin noticing things in a way you haven’t done for years. You notice the light coming through a particular window in the morning. You notice the sounds outside, the shape of the neighbourhood, the way the air feels and smells when you step outside, and all the small characteristics of a place that will eventually become invisible through familiarity.

There’s a kind of freshness to it because your brain hasn’t yet learned what it can safely ignore. You’re paying attention again, and in a very real sense, you’re more awake.

Of course, moving house isn’t the only thing that can do this. A new job, a long trip, a relationship beginning or ending, learning a new skill, taking on a challenge or making some substantial decision can have exactly the same effect. Anything that interrupts the old pattern can cause us to look again at things we had stopped seeing.

Sometimes life does this to us without asking permission, but I think there’s also real value in choosing to do it deliberately from time to time.

We can change the route we always take, rearrange a room, visit somewhere unfamiliar, learn something we’ve never attempted before, or simply alter one of the routines that has become completely automatic. None of these things needs to be dramatic. The point isn’t novelty for its own sake.

The point is that a change in pattern can change attention, and a change in attention can make life feel different because we’re actually participating in it again rather than merely moving through what we already know.

In hypnosis, we naturally tend to think of trance as something that happens when someone closes their eyes, relaxes and turns their attention inward, but there’s another kind of trance that interests me just as much. It’s the trance of familiarity, where the world becomes so well known that we stop really looking at it.

We don’t notice how much of our behaviour has become automatic because automatic behaviour feels normal, and normality is very good at disguising itself.

That’s one of the unexpected gifts hidden inside a major change. It can wake us up. It can make the world feel new again, even if only temporarily, because the old assumptions and routines are no longer doing all the work for us. We’re forced to pay attention, to make decisions consciously, and to engage with what’s actually happening rather than simply running the familiar programme.

I think the interesting question is whether we can learn to do some of that deliberately. We probably don’t need to move house every time life begins to feel too familiar, but perhaps we do need to notice when we’ve slipped too deeply into the trance of the ordinary and then find some intelligent way of interrupting it.

Sometimes changing your life begins with something much simpler than a grand decision. Sometimes it begins by waking up enough to see the life you already have.

And a big thanks to my wife for giving me the idea of seeing moving house as escaping a trance. I think she was absolutely right.

Mike

The post The Trance of Familiarity: Why You Stopped Seeing Your Own Life appeared first on Mike Mandel Hypnosis.

Last episode we argued that bad hypnotic subjects don't exist. This one is the practical half. If the person in front of you isn't the problem, what do you actually do? In this episode of the Brain Software Podcast, Mike Mandel and Chris Thompson stop debating hypnotizability and start handing out experiences instead, because experience beats argument every time. This week's breakdown covers the distinction that makes it work — it isn't formally hypnosis, but it is hypnotic — along with the demonstrations, the language patterns and the one metaphor that ties the whole thing together.

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The post It’s Not Hypnosis… But It Is Hypnotic – BSP (Ep 313) appeared first on Mike Mandel Hypnosis.

You can study swimming for years. Breathing, body position, stroke mechanics, buoyancy, technique. You can watch Olympic swimmers and become impressively knowledgeable about what good swimming is supposed to look like.
But eventually, you have to get in the pool.

It's a question I get asked constantly, and after many years of teaching hypnosis I've noticed something about the people who ask it. Some people take a course and start doing hypnosis. Other people take a course and then take another course. And then another. Before long, they’ve accumulated certifications, techniques, books, videos, seminars, online training, and more information than they could possibly put into practice.

But somehow, they still haven’t really started.

That’s where things get interesting, because learning can become one of the most sophisticated forms of procrastination. It feels productive, and often it genuinely is productive. But it can also provide a wonderfully respectable way of avoiding the moment when you actually have to do something.

Nobody questions you when you say you’re studying, preparing, researching or improving your skills. All of that sounds completely sensible. The problem begins when preparation quietly becomes a permanent state and you find yourself endlessly standing beside the pool.

Don’t misunderstand me. I’m a lifelong learner and always have been. I’ve spent my entire adult life studying hypnosis, communication, psychology, martial arts, personal development and all sorts of wonderfully strange things. I love learning, and I have no intention of stopping.

There are still books I want to read, people I want to learn from and ideas I want to explore. Learning keeps life interesting. It opens doors and prevents us from becoming stale or overconfident. But learning is supposed to lead somewhere.

There’s a huge difference between learning because you’re curious and growing, and learning because you’re afraid to begin.

I’ve met people who know an astonishing amount about hypnosis but hardly ever hypnotize anyone. They can discuss inductions, suggestibility tests, deepeners, phenomena, language patterns and therapeutic approaches in great detail. They know the terminology, the methods and perhaps even the history.

Yet when it comes to actually sitting down with another person and doing hypnosis, they hesitate. That’s because despite all their learning, they aren’t hypnotists. They’re fact collectors.

They need one more technique, one more certification, one more training that will finally make them feel ready. Then perhaps another one after that, just to be sure.

The trouble is, they may never feel ready.

Readiness isn’t always something that arrives before action. Very often, it develops because of action. You start doing the thing, discover that you can survive your own mistakes, learn what works, and gradually become more confident because you now have evidence that you can actually do it.

At some point, competence stops coming primarily from learning more and starts coming from experience.

You have to work with real people. You have to try things, notice what happens, make mistakes, adjust and try again. You need those wonderful sessions when something works far better than you expected, because they teach you what you’re capable of. You also need the occasional session where absolutely nothing seems to happen and you’re left thinking, “Well, that was interesting.”

Those sessions teach you something too.

Real practice gives you things that no course can completely provide. People don’t always respond the way the textbook says they should. They surprise you, misunderstand you, react in unusual ways or suddenly produce something you weren’t expecting. Sometimes they respond brilliantly to something you thought was rather ordinary. At other times, your favourite technique goes absolutely nowhere.

That’s when you stop merely repeating what you’ve learned and begin developing judgment.

You start noticing the person in front of you rather than mentally leafing through your training manuals. You become more flexible. You improvise. You trust yourself a little more. That kind of skill only develops when you’re actually doing hypnosis, just as balance and confidence in the water only develop when you’re actually swimming.

There comes a point when another ten hours of training may teach you less than one hour spent actually doing the thing.

This certainly isn’t confined to hypnosis. People do exactly the same thing with coaching, therapy, writing, public speaking, business, fitness and almost everything else. They’ll start when they know a little more, when they’re more confident, when circumstances are better or when they’ve got another qualification.

Then one day they look around and realize five years have gone by and they’re still standing beside the pool.

Maybe we’ve got the relationship between confidence and action backwards. We tend to imagine confidence as something we must possess before we start, as though it’s an admission ticket we need before we’re allowed to participate. But perhaps confidence is more often the result of starting, struggling a little, learning from what happens and slowly discovering that we can actually handle it.

You don’t need to feel like an expert before you begin.

In fact, you probably won’t.

Think about almost anything you’re genuinely good at. You probably weren’t very good when you started. If you were anything like the rest of us, you may have been fairly terrible. You did it badly, then a little less badly, then reasonably well. Eventually your movements became smoother, your decisions became faster and you stopped having to consciously think about every little piece of the process. Somewhere along the way, almost without noticing, you became competent.

Then one day you realized you were actually pretty damn good at it.

That progression is easy to forget once you’ve developed a skill. We look at competent people and see the finished product, but we don’t usually see the awkward first attempts, the mistakes, the uncertainty or the countless little corrections that produced the ability.

A good swimmer looks completely at home in the water. The movements seem natural and almost effortless. But that ease came from countless hours in the pool, not from standing on the deck thinking about freestyle.

Nobody learns to swim by standing beside the pool, no matter how many books on swimming they’ve read. You can understand buoyancy, breathing, stroke mechanics and hydrodynamics perfectly, but eventually the theory has to meet the water.

Nobody becomes a writer simply by studying writing, and nobody becomes a hypnotist simply by studying hypnosis.

Knowledge matters enormously. Good training can save you years of confusion and bad habits, and a great teacher can completely change the way you understand a subject. I’m certainly not suggesting that people stop learning.

So keep learning. Read the books. Take good courses. Find excellent teachers and spend time with people who are better than you are. Stay curious for the rest of your life, because curiosity keeps the mind alive and prevents competence from turning into complacency.

But watch carefully for that subtle point where learning stops being preparation and starts becoming protection. Ask yourself whether you really need another course right now, or whether “one more training” has become a wonderfully convincing excuse for not getting started.

Ask yourself what would happen if, instead of buying another program, you took the knowledge you already have and actually used it for the next thirty days. Work with people. Practice. Pay attention. Make corrections. Learn from what actually happens rather than from what you imagine might happen.

You may discover that you’re much more prepared than you thought.

And perhaps the question isn’t always, “Who should I train with next?” Sometimes the better question is, “When am I going to start using what I already know?”

Because sooner or later, you have to stop standing beside the pool.

Sometimes you just have to get in and swim.

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The post Nobody Learns to Swim Beside the Pool appeared first on Mike Mandel Hypnosis.

Try squeezing toothpaste back into the tube…
That was my father's answer when I told him I could learn to do anything at all.
He was right, and it turned out to be one of the more freeing things anyone has ever said to me.

As a young boy, I recall reading an article in Readers Digest that talked about human potential, and since I was skinny and small, it grabbed my attention immediately. It offered me the fantasy of being big and strong and powerful…

The basic premise of the writer was that since we all have essentially the same neurology, we are all able to do pretty well anything that anyone else can do. This became a recurrent theme in modern NLP in the 1970s, and was touted by Tony Robbins and others. At least until reality came crashing in…

I told my Dad that I just read that I can learn to do and be anything, and expected him to agree and support my delusion. Instead, after a moment's thought, he handed me the toothpaste.

But it wasn't a chiding or mocking remark from him. He smiled at me, and went on to say that we all have different skills, which is why there's only one World Chess Champion; not billions of World Chess Champions with equal chess ratings.

And then he continued the gentle lecture, telling me that we not only all have a different set of skills, but different weaknesses too. We are all human, and therefore similar. But our skills and lack of skills made us all a bit different from each other.

I felt a bit disappointed hearing this, but Dad was an engineer, and a remarkably intelligent and logical man. He possessed legendary skills in mathematics. He died young, in 1981, when liquid crystals were becoming mainstream, and long before the boom in personal computers or even electronic calculators.

Dad did his calculations on a slide rule, which he called a "guessing stick", and kept a calculus textbook on his bedside table for light reading.

And I got none of those skills. None at all.

Nor did I get any of Dad's mechanical ability, which was legendary, but not passed on to my DNA at all.

It's almost a joke in my household that my wife has all the mechanical skills. She measures things, puts up pictures, drills holes, and uses a wide variety of tools.

I prefer to watch the process.

The other day the remote to our television stopped working, just before a crucial Toronto Blue Jays game. I assumed the batteries had finally died, and switched them for new ones. But the new batteries made no difference at all, resulting in much colorful language…

I thought outside the box, and found a free app that turned my iPhone into a remote, and it worked perfectly! But as I was busy rejoicing in my problem-solving ability, my wife cleaned the residue off the remote electrical contacts with some fine sandpaper, effectively fixing the remote.

It was a moment of both triumph and humiliation…depending on one's perspective.

Now realizing that we aren't all equally skilled or talented is not a limiting belief. It's actually a freeing reality.

I'm not just a big picture guy. I'm a huge picture guy. I struggle with too many details, which is why despite years of concerted study on all aspects of chess, mastery eluded me. I could never stop missing crucial details which led to game-losing blunders.

But when I discovered the 5,000 year old game Backgammon, everything changed. And that's because Backgammon is a big-picture game. It's all about pattern recognition, rather than calculation. And unlike chess, it enables me to move very quickly, as I recognize the position from my internal library.

So I work to my strength, rather than attempting to fix the unfixable.

The post You Can’t Be Anything You Want appeared first on Mike Mandel Hypnosis.

For decades, the hypnosis community has leaned on the excuse that some people are simply poor or "bad" subjects. This myth stems from outdated suggestibility tests and rigid depth scales that fail to account for individual human differences. But what if a person's failure to respond just means the practitioner used the wrong approach? In this episode, Mike Mandel and Chris Thompson completely flip the script on hypnotic suggestibility. They reveal why bad subjects are exceptionally rare among sane individuals and explain how adopting a flexible approach can entirely transform your practice. By treating hypnosis as an educational process rather than a magic, you can learn to guide even the most analytical minds into deep, restorative trance states.

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The post The Myth of the “Bad” Hypnosis Subject – BSP (Ep 312) appeared first on Mike Mandel Hypnosis.

It’s widely considered to be one of the most painful human experiences…
Eventually, everyone grieves.
There’s no getting around it.

Because if we live long enough, we're going to lose people we love, animals we adore, relationships we thought would last, and pieces of a life we assumed would always be there.

And grief isn't restricted to death. We can grieve the end of a marriage or friendship, the sale of the family home, the loss of a career, our physical abilities, independence, community, or even a future we were absolutely certain was going to happen.

At its simplest, grief is the psychological response to significant loss, but I think there's an even better way to describe it.

Grief is what happens to the mind and body when we've formed a powerful attachment to someone or something, and suddenly we have to live in a world where that attachment can no longer operate in the way it once did. That's one of the reasons grief can be so unbelievably painful.

I've had my own encounters with grief over the years, and one thing I've learned is that it doesn't behave in a nice, orderly fashion. It comes in waves, often when you least expect it. You can be doing remarkably well and getting on with your life when a piece of music plays, you find an old photograph, or you hear somebody use a particular expression. Suddenly, the grief that seemed to be fading is standing right in front of you again.

New grief also tends to get bundled together with old grief, the stuff you thought you were over but that was still lurking below the surface. My own opinion is that some grief never completely disappears, but that certainly doesn't mean we have to remain trapped in it.

Grief can affect virtually everything. It can bring sadness, loneliness, anger, guilt, anxiety and numbness, along with mental fog, poor concentration and repetitive thoughts.

It affects the body too, causing fatigue, disrupted sleep, appetite changes and physical tension. We may withdraw, lose interest in things we enjoy, avoid painful reminders, or find ourselves preoccupied with the person or situation we've lost.

Grief can even mess with our sense of identity, especially when we lose someone who has been part of our life for many years. It can leave us facing the unsettling question, Who am I now that this person is gone?

So what can we actually do about it?

I think the first thing is to recognize that grief isn't a problem to be solved. It's a process to be facilitated, and ultimately you cannot go over it, around it, or under it. You have to go through it.

That doesn't mean wallowing in misery or spending the rest of your life talking about your loss. It means allowing the process to happen without forcing it, ignoring it, or pretending you're fine when you're anything but.

Ritual can help enormously. Something meaningful that connects us with what we've lost can give the grief somewhere to go. A listening ear can be just as valuable. Not someone telling us to cheer up or look on the bright side, but someone willing to simply shut up and listen.

It's also worth resisting the urge to immediately fill the hole with another spouse, another best friend, another dog or cat. There's nothing wrong with eventually forming new relationships or loving another animal, but immediately trying to replace what was lost can become another way of avoiding the grief itself.

And self-medication is a lousy strategy. Alcohol and drugs may temporarily blunt emotional pain, but numbing grief is not the same thing as processing it.

You need to take care of the obvious physical stuff too. Eat properly, get the sleep you need, and get up and move. Walking can be remarkably helpful, particularly if you can get outside and into nature. You don't have to turn it into some elaborate exercise program. Moving your body, getting some fresh air and changing your surroundings can make a difference.

And if you need professional help, get it. There's no prize for suffering unnecessarily. Most people gradually find themselves able to get on with their lives, even though traces of grief may remain. If a long time has passed and you're still stuck in the same painful thoughts and conversations, it may be time to get some help.

There are also some very simple techniques I've found useful for helping people work with the emotional intensity of grief. A good place to begin is by getting a SUDs level, which stands for Subjective Units of Distress. Simply ask yourself, on a scale from zero to ten, how strong is this feeling right now?

Rather than trying to measure something enormous called "my grief," make it specific. It might be the empty chair, the last conversation, a particular memory, or the thing you desperately wish you'd said. Get the number, do some work, and then check the number again. Even a movement from an eight to a six tells you that something has changed.

Hypnosis and guided imagery can be extremely useful here. Sometimes an imagined conversation, or an opportunity to say goodbye in the theatre of the mind, can allow something unfinished to finally move.

Jin Shin Jyutsu is another beautifully simple tool. Holding the ring finger, or working through the points on the hands, can be done whenever the emotional pain appears. It requires no special equipment and can be repeated throughout the day.

Freespotting is another simple but effective technique worth experimenting with. Let your eyes wander and allow your unconscious mind to find the place where they naturally want to settle. Stay there for about five minutes, feeling the emotions as you stare at that spot without trying to force anything to happen. Simply notice what changes and shifts.

The important thing to understand is that none of these techniques is intended to erase the person, the event, or the memory. We're not trying to become indifferent to someone we loved. We're helping the nervous system process what happened so we can remember without continually experiencing the same overwhelming emotional response.

I've also recommended the Bach Flower Remedy - Star of Bethlehem to friends who were grieving, and they found it helpful. I'm not telling you to take it, but you might want to look into it and decide for yourself. You'll find it in a good health food store.

And that brings me to one of the most beautiful grief rituals I've ever encountered, called the Wind Telephone.

The idea began in Japan in 2010 with a man named Itaru Sasaki, who had lost his cousin. He placed an old telephone booth in his garden containing a disconnected telephone and would pick up the receiver and talk to his cousin. There was nobody on the other end, of course, but that wasn't the point.

Following the devastating Japanese earthquake and tsunami in 2011, other grieving people began using the telephone too, and since then Wind Telephones have appeared in other parts of the world.

The concept is incredibly simple. You pick up the telephone and say whatever you still need to say. Maybe it's "I miss you" or "I'm sorry." Perhaps it's "I forgive you," "I love you," or simply "Goodbye."

There's something psychologically powerful about taking a conversation that has been endlessly repeating inside your head and finally speaking it out loud. An internal conversation becomes an external one, and sometimes that seems to be exactly what was needed.

So here's an interesting question to consider. If you could pick up a telephone right now and speak to someone you've lost, what is the one thing you most need to say?

You might be surprised by the answer.

And if someone you care about is grieving, remember that you don't necessarily have to fix anything. Listen to them, walk with them, sit with them, and let them tell the same story again if they need to. When appropriate, perhaps show them some of the tools that can help reduce the emotional intensity while allowing the memories and love to remain.

Because sometimes grief isn't asking us to get over something. Sometimes it's asking us to finish a conversation.

Perhaps grief dredges the heart. It deepens the places where sorrow lives, but perhaps those deeper places can someday hold more love and joy as well.

We're all in this together.

- Mike Mandel

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The post Sometimes Grief Is Asking Us to Finish a Conversation appeared first on Mike Mandel Hypnosis.