Trevor's Blog

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.

In one of his last speeches John F Kennedy spoke about how Frank O’Connor the Irish writer, spoke in one of his books, how, as a boy, he and his friends would make their way across the countryside, and when they came to an orchard wall that seemed too high and too doubtful to try and too difficult to permit their voyage to continue, they took off their hats and tossed them over the wall – and then they had no choice but to follow them.

In life there are always reasons to be cautious, and sometimes it’s obviously right to be so, but I see a lot of clients who seem to have forgotten that they are mortal. They worry about what’s ahead to the point where they keep themselves stuck in their present unhappiness.

If we’re lucky there will be a moment on our death-bed when we have a chance to look back on our life and assess the choices we made. And I bet few will applaud the times we didn’t take a chance, or commit to something that could fail, and remember with pride the times they stepped into the unknown.

For me, leaving a police career 18 years into it in order to pursue as a risky living something I had fallen in love with, was one of my big ‘throw my hat’ moments and has led to a life that feels blessed – and I know I’ll smile at the memory when I breathe my last. So I really encourage you to find some walls that seem too tall to climb, and throw your hat. You’ll enjoy the climb as much as the view from the top.

Trevor is learning Wing Chun, the form of Kung Fu that formed the base of Bruce Lee’s technique. He recently attended a seminar with the leading practitioner of his style in Europe and, having just been invited to become a monthly contributor to the magazine, took the opportunity to question him.

In a fascinating article you can read in full by clicking on the link at the end of this blog Sharon Begley relates some recent research that shows that, despite it being six million years since apes and humans split from our common ancestor, they are still able to understand our emotional expressions. even more amazing is that they seem to understand how our expressions relate to an internal state that leads to an action.

I see Cognitive Hypnotherapy as sitting comfortably beneath the CBT umbrella (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy), but where most in this discipline think that emotions arise as a result of our thoughts, our practitioners hold the view that emotion comes first and the thoughts we have are an interpretation of an existing state, so both have to be given attention. This makes more sense from an evolutionary point of view, and this research appears to support the primacy (in terms of age) of the emotional system .

Here’s the article

Trevor continues his explanation of how our approach can often bring rapid improvement for this condition.

I’m not a great one for sitting about; relaxing for me is usually some kind of activity like running or martial arts. However this year I have been working on adjusting the balance between ‘doing’ and ‘being’, and I’ve found that giving myself more time and space to watch the world has opened up my levels of appreciation enormously, and with it my sense of wellbeing. Rubin Battino once gave a very special seminar for the members of Quest. He has worked with many terminally people and he made the comment that, at the end of life, all that’s left that matters is people and nature. I’ve found that, when I do less, these are the two things my appreciation turns to. And they’re the first things that drop out of my awareness when I get busy. maybe there’s something important in that.

This was posted in one of the Quest forum, and I thought it fitted beautifully with this general theme. Have a good journey today, and appreciate the people in your life, and the nature that surrounds you. Whatever your troubles, the birds are still singing.

In this article Trevor uses examples from the mindsets of elite athletes to show how you can use your mind to push you to even higher levels of performance.

There are many people who urgently need help with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder PTSD, many of them from the armed and emergency services. This article is similar to the one in Police Professional, and will soon appear in a number of others in order to educate the right people about the potential of our approach.

It has long been a basic proposition of rapport building within Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) that people unconsciously trust those who are most like them. This has led to the idea of matching or mirroring other people’s physiology or modes of speech in order to build an unconscious positive connection. Done well, I’ve found that it works extremely well, and is a basic skill that we teach our Cognitive Hypnotherapy students.

Now evidence from a study conducted by researchers at St Andrews University has validated this approach. Scientists used computer graphics to manipulate men’s faces before women rated their attractiveness.

The faces were made to look more or less masculine by altering areas including jaw lines, and more or less like the women who rated them as part of the research.

It was found that women both trusted the men who most resembled them, and found them most attractive. The full story can be found here.