Trevor's Blog

In this issue of Slim at Home a graduate of a SlimQuest class describes how Cognitive Hypnotherapy techniques changed her attitude to food, and her dress size.

Dan Brown writes books that are perfect for holidays. After the success of the DaVinci Code he had a tough job on his hands but I think he’s done well. While the usual criticisms apply – his dialogue and characters are pretty wooden – his assemblage of research is superb and interesting, and some of it was right up our street.

I actually think that he may have done a clever thing – written a book about a book with layers, which contains its own layers.

Obviously I’m not going to touch on the plot, I just wanted to share some of the ideas I took from it. He makes the point about how religion places the emphasis for our creation on an external force, and he makes you think about how differently we approach life when we think of ourselves as the creator of our life, not the created. After all, if we are the creator, nothing external can ‘make us’ anything – like feel stupid, ugly or unloved. All of a sudden we are in control of who we are and the world we live in.

He suggests that this was the true quest within alchemy; it wasn’t about changing lead to gold – that was a metaphor; it was about transforming yourself.

He quotes from the writings of the followers of Hermes Trismegistus “Know ye not that ye are gods?”, Buddha “You are god yourself” and Jesus “The works I do, you can do…and greater.” to make the point that the idea of us all having a divine spark within us is in the sense that we design our own reality; we each create a personal universe.

This message really sits at the heart of what I teach; that success in life comes from having an internal, not an external, locus of control:
You act on the world, not wait for it to act on you.
You make things happen, not hope things will happen.
You make yourself the writer of your story, not a character in someone elses.
It was a lesson it took me a long time to learn, but it was the lesson that has led to everything that’s good in my life.

Even his use of a phrase that appears on the Great Seal of the United States, ‘Annuit Coeptis’ made me do a double take. It means “God favours our undertaking.”

How many countries, religions and special interest groups have claimed that one? I think it’s because we assume ‘undertaking’ to be a noun. Notice how different it becomes if you make it a verb. God favours us when we undertake (and we are our own God). How pleased do I feel that the mantra that changed my life is ‘Take Action’?

Of course, I’ve gone deep, and the Lost Symbol might just be a page turner. But I guess in my universe it is what I create it to be. Buy it and decide for yourself.

I’ve just returned from a holiday to South Africa – so brace yourself, because I saw so much that made me think “ooh, that’s a blog.”

Anyway, one of the defining moments of the holiday was a trip to Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela was held prisoner for 18 years. The tour begins deceptively, taking you on a coach tour of the island, showing you the village where the guards lived, with its school, and church and post office, and the house where Robert Sobukwe, another leader of the anti-Apartheid struggle, was kept. The engaging guide kept up a dialogue that just began to suck you in. She made us aware that nobody on the bus had heard of him, yet he was a pivotal figure, and how he was kept in isolation; the only way he could communicate with fellow prisoners was through gestures and hand signals, including them picking up a handful of dirt to signify they were all part of the same land.

And then we came to the limestone quarry where Mandela and many others toiled. The light reflects so badly in the quarry that most were left with damaged eyes. In the quarry is a cave, which doubled as a toilet, but also secretly as a classroom. Whenever the opportunity arose they would teach each other. They were lawyers, and doctors, and teachers, and farmers. each had something to give. And the phrase they used was the title of this blog; ‘each one teach one’. We were sucked in further.

I thought that a fantastic sentiment. Can you imagine sitting on the floor with a hammer, spending the day making rocks into smaller rocks? Can you imagine spending 18 years of such days? And in the midst of this attempt to destroy their spirit and degrade their humanity their suffering only served to concentrate it.

We were then passed onto a guide who was a prisoner there for 8 years. We sat in his old dormitory as he eloquently told us of the prisoner’s experience. The ’sucking in’ was complete. All were silent, and many were in tears. He spoke of how black prisoners were given 100 grams less meat than asian or ‘coloured’ prisoners, who also got jam, but how the prisoners shared it equally between them. How they were only called by their number, not their name – Mandela is 46664 – and how they were cut off from contact with the world to make them feel forgotten.

He walked us past Mandela’s 6′x6′ cell – too small for him to lay full length – and the yard where he sat and broke rocks. In the corner of this yard is a vine that Mandela tended. I found it a moving example of how, when other choices and freedoms are taken from you, there are still opportunities to make other choices. I willed for a leaf to fall as a momento, but things that survive Robben Island give nothing up easily.

And at the end our guide told a little of himself, of his torture and suffering, but spoke most about reconciliation and the need for people to come together in unity.

So the experience for me was about the power of sharing; our knowledge, our time, our care and our humanity. And we all have something to give.

If you’re not enjoying your training it’s going to seriously affect your motivation and performance levels. Find out how to use enjoyment as a way to take you to another level.

I’m the sports mind coach of Pat McAleese, a promising young boxer who has gone from 90 to 23 in the rankings in the time I’ve been working with him. This is an article I wrote when we switched roles and he trained me in boxing technique. It appeared in the programme of his ninth fight, and NMT magazine.

Chocolate activates a part of the brain that blunts pain and makes it difficult to stop eating. A study by the University of Chicago gave rats chocolate chips to eat while a heat source under their cage warmed its floor. Normally this would cause them to lift their paws, but while they ate their pain response was dulled and they kept their paws in place for longer. They also kept on eating.

For anybody trained as a Cognitive Hypnotherapist the idea that eating dulls pain is instantly interesting because I wonder whether emotional pain also responds in the same way? If it does, it provides an insight into those clients who respond to negative emotions by overeating. Studies have linked eating disorders to traumatic memories in as many as 40% of sufferers, and this could provide an insight into why so many people view food as ‘comfort’.

What the study also shows is that drinking water also has the same effect, so it is the act of ingesting that seems important, not what is ingested. With Wordweaving, our approach to hypnotic suggestion, it would be possible to adjust a client’s choice of food or drink at the same times as working with them to clear the emorional root of the pain. In that way their issue is being worked on in several different ways at once. Food for thought.

Read about the study here.

I know this isn’t a conventional topic for my blog, but I hope you’ll agree that it’s an understandable exception.

Saturday was simply one of the most perfect days of my life. The setting was amazing; the OBE Chapel in the crypt of St Pauls, surrounded by the tombs of William Blake, Wren, Nelson and Wellington gave the ceremony a feeling that was indescribable. And the great thing was, the setting wasn’t the most memorable part of it.

To see my son Mark’s face when he saw his wife walk down the aisle (where moments before he looked like he was about to be sick), was a heart-stopping moment, because he looked how I feel when I’m about to do something difficult and Bex walks in. I guess because she makes me feel that together we can do anything, when I saw Mark and Tara look at each other the same way, I felt safe for them too. And I know that’s my projection, and I don’t care.

And so many other things: The bond between Mark and his brother Stuart (who was best man) and his half-brother Glen, was a beautiful thing to behold. The moment with my ex-wife Karen, her partner Mark, Bex and myself when we toasted the good job we’ve done raising fine boys, was precious, and watching Stu give the best Best Man’s speech I’ve ever heard was truly spooky, because we always look for bits of us in what our children do, but sometimes you see emerge from them something that isn’t simply an inherited trait, or a mix of stuff from their parents, it’s something uniquely their own, and his delivery had a charisma that came from nowhere else and no one else.

And watching Mr and Mrs Mark Silvester set off for their honeymoon the next morning glowing with happiness, with all of the hopes and dreams that attend that moment in young lives, left me so profoundly grateful for everything I have in my life, and everything that has got me to this point of it, that I had to sit alone for a while to compose myself. So much of the good in life springs from the love of the people you share it with; and I’m truly blessed.

But Bex was a bit mean laughing for a full half of a hymn, just because of my singing. Inside I’m Bobby Brown.

In 1983 an experiment by Benjamin Libet seemed to indicate that our unconscious was responsible for behaviour that we attributed to our own free will. This isn’t something that we as humans take kindly to – after all, you’re in charge of your decisions, aren’t you?

His experiment seemed to say no, so it will be with some relief that a recent study by researchers in New Zealand have come up with evidence that the original conclusions were wrong. You can read about it here.

Clearly the issue is far from resolved. I suspect that in the end it will be shown that we can have free will, but that most of the things we do are determined by unconscious processes. After all, we’re not conscious of teh here and now for 90% of the day, so how can we claim to be in charge of all our choices.

When people come to see a Cognitive Hypnotherapist it is usually to find help with something they don’t feel able to change themelves, ie they don’t have free will over a particular set of behaviours in particular situations.

I think it’s because we’re not alone in our heads. We have the ‘I’; that sense of ourselves that makes us feel so special as a species, but I think we also have a number of other aspects of our self which emerge in certain contexts and take over what we do. There’s nothing spooky about it, they’re just other aspects of the mental processing from which our ‘I’ emerges.

The process of successful therapy that we teach in our Cognitive Hypnotherapy Diploma course is often about re-educating these ‘parts’ so that they generate the behaviour that your will prefers.

We can probably never have free will in all situations; our unconscious does a lot of the driving, but with proper training you can at least choose the direction it heads in most of the time.

Many athletes follow routines that help their frame of mind, or keep with them times that make them ‘lucky’. In this article Trevor explores why this is so, how they can be a help, and how to avoid them being a hindrance. Did you know it’s bad luck to read this without now reading the article?

I spent yesterday sad at the passing of Patrick Swayze. Strange, isn’t it, how we can be moved by the circumstances of someone we’ve never met? I can’t claim him as a hero because I don’t know much of him as a real person, but I connected with him in some way through many of the roles he played, especially in Roadhouse.

Why we respond to certain actors, or certain types of character, has been something that has interested me for a long time. On our Diploma course I teach an exercise called Trackdown. Clients identify their favourite childhood book or film, and their favourite book or film now, and look for links between the two. Then they think about how those similarities are present in their life story. There’s a bit more to it than that, but it’s amazing how often clients will have a moment of insight about how the narrative of their life has echoes of themes in their favourite stories. In my case my favourite story as a boy was King Arthur, and my favourite film as an adult is The Matrix. If you think about it, they’re the same story. Neo is Arthur, Morpheus is Merlin, etc.

As a child I didn’t feel that I fitted into my family; I have a brother and sister who are adopted, and I was sure I must be too, and I spent a long time waiting to be ‘recognised’ by someone who would elevate me to my ‘rightful place’. So I spent a long time going precisely nowhere. Releasing myself from that story has changed my life, and made ‘Take Action’ my mantra.

The basis of this projection of ourselves into a story is called isomorphism, and it’s why metaphors can be so effective in communicating information – our brains look for an equivalence between the story and our own situation.

So when I watch Swayze my mind is projecting something of myself onto him, either something I see as similar, or something I wish for myself. So when we watch actors who epitomise the virtues we desire, in some way, at some level, we become them, so their passing is a small personal death as well.

So I want to thank Patrick for the effect he had on me, and the chance he gave me to imagine myself as I’d like to be; I’d like to think that perhaps in that way he lives on in many of us.