That’s changed. In the supermarket this week I stood beside my wife looking at the salad display and said, “What shall we get, they all look delicious?” And I wasn’t joking.

At this point I suppose you’d expect me to start talking about a marvellous bit of therapy or a new technique I’ve developed that has led to this transformation, but that’s not it at all. It came from a simple question, and it started because I set myself a goal.

I’m lucky that I’m surrounded within the Quest network by a lot of people who inspire me. They discover new things, they take on new challenges, they stretch themselves in new ways. In other words, they quest. One of these guys, Jamie Panter, posted on our forum about a book by Tim Ferris called the Four Hour Body, and how he was using the principles in it to get fitter. I’ve been searching around for a physical goal for a while and the spiel on Amazon intrigued me, so I got a copy. Tim is an interesting man. He strikes me as a guy who uses his OCD nature in a positive way to explore things that interest him. How his body works, and what it can be made to do, is one of those curiosities. He hooked me right away because he doesn’t stick with received wisdom, he explores the edges of fields such as strength training, endurance sports, and diet. What he had to say about diet got me started. Most people would consider me reasonably slim, but my body fat is higher than you’d imagine. He was talking about how to reduce body fat, not lose weight, and that interested me. So I decided to give his way a go. Please understand, this is not a diet. Diets don’t work, they make you fatter. This was just a different way of eating to manipulate your metabolism. It includes a number of hardcore things – like icy showers – but I thought I’d start off easy and just cut out the things he says contribute to fat gain, principally white carbs – that means, rice, bread, sugar and potatoes. What you can eat is meat and vegetables (no fruit). You see my problem?

Anyway, I committed to it. I made myself a wordweaving download to support its principles and I asked Bex to put any veg she chose on my plate and I promised to eat it without complaint. For the first few days I had a mantra: I was eating meat and medicine, and it got me through the strangeness of it. Then I became aware of an increasing dissonance in my head. If it had been a conversation it would have gone like this:
“This actually tastes ok.”
“No it doesn’t, you don’t like veg.”
“But, you know, actually, I am really quite enjoying the tastes and textures.”
“Shut up. You don’t like veg.”
“I know I didn’t but…”
“La la la…NOT LISTENING. You aren’t someone who likes vegetables.”

And then a question sprung into my head: “Who would I be if I did?”

It was like a bucket of cold water. It was like walking into a glass door you didn’t see because of a daydream. It was a sudden, shocking moment of waking up. In an instant I realised that all these years it hadn’t been about the veg, it had been about ‘who would I be if I…” Like a film on fast forward I recalled images of the times I was made to stay at the table to finish my dinner when everyone else had got down. I can remember hiding things under a lip of the dinner table, and putting loads of salad cream on my plate so I could sink the salad beneath it out of the view of the shrewish dinner ladies. At home and at school my childhood finickity nature with food was confronted, and it became a war. Me against authority with green things as the battleground. And I don’t remember ever losing. My whole life I’ve reacted strongly, including over-reacting, against anyone imposing their will on me, and never realised that lettuce was at the root of it. Who would I be if I was someone who ate vegetables? The answer my unconscious was using was clear: A weakling. Someone who surrenders. Someone who does as he’s told. It was around this moment that I walked into the glass door. What a load of rubbish. I’d been a version of myself based on that?

The edifice collapsed. If it’s not about vegetables, then it was time to create my own relationship to them. Who would I be if I was someone who liked green stuff? Someone who instantly felt happier, more in control of their choices, and definitely healthier, that’s who. How weird. I’ve realised that I’ve been carrying a stomach around inside me that’s been unhappy with my diet for so long I’d forgotten it could feel any different. For the first time it now feels like it belongs to me. And it’s going to be interesting to see how I’m changed in situations where I feel I’m being manipulated.

Who would I be if I didn’t?

This question has become a very important one. Bex and I have started to use it when we confront any limitation or reluctance to do something. “I don’t want to…” is met with “Who would I be if I did want to?” and it’s led to some interesting realisations, especially that a lot of things I ‘don’t want to’ I’m glad I did after I’ve done them.

In my latest book I made the point that we are the creators of ourselves. This food experiment has given me a chance to witness that fact, from the exposure of an unconscious belief, to its instant updating when opened up to the light of the present day.

What has come from this is the importance of questing. In my Peak Performance course I speak about setting unreasonable goals, ones that you have to adjust your world to be able to achieve, ones that are beyond your sensible expectations. This question has given that a new focus. If that goal is unrealistic, who would I be to be achieving it?

So, I’ve set some goals. Ali Turner went from not running at all to a half marathon in 12 weeks. Another great Questie, Mani Hirani, ran a marathon from never running at all in just six months. I’m going to run in next year’s London marathon. Tim Ferris claims you can run it without huge training mileages. I’m going to try that.

On a recent holiday to Spain we stayed in a hotel where few staff spoke English. The cheek. I am someone who expects people to speak my language. Who would I be if I wasn’t? I’m going to learn a foreign language while I run.

And another questie, Lenny Deveril West, has just started a 100 press up challenge. I think I’ll give that a go too. And if anyone reading this thinks “I don’t do press-ups”, ask yourself, “who would you be if you did?” You might find yourself enjoying being you even more. That’s what I’ve found that question has done for me.

The book that made Tim Ferris’s reputation was the 4 hour work week. I’ve read that too, and it’s made my head spin. I’ve worked a minimum of six days a week for the last 11 years – and thought that a good thing. Who would I be if I didn’t? So I’m going to adjust my business so I can cut my hours drastically. Who do I need to be to achieve that? I’m looking forward to finding out.

So, here’s a challenge: If you’re not someone who can ask someone out. Ask yourself “Who would I be if I was?” and act upon the answer.

If there’s something holding you back from something you’d love to do ask yourself “who would I be if I was the kind of person who did what they loved?” and act on the answer.

You get my drift. Set an unreasonable goal, ask the question, and act from within the answer. And let me know what happens.

If you’ve read my new book you’ll know this. Cognitive Hypnotherapy isn’t a therapy like other therapies, and it’s a bit difficult to explain, but easy to grasp. I used Bruce Lee as an example in the book, so I’ll continue. If you filmed him fighting and split it into distinct segments, and showed people who didn’t know him one of those segments they would probably says “He’s karate”. Show someone else another clip they’d say “He’s judo”, yet another, “He’s kung fu”. It’s only when you show the whole fight you’d see he’s doing Jeet Kune Do – using his opponents responses as his guide for which technique from which approach to use at each particular moment. It’s the same with Cog Hyp. It’s a framework to guide the same kind of choices we have to make with each client, rather than a therapy in itself.

So to put Cognitive Hypnotherapy in a list of other approaches is only accurate if you realise that everything else in that list is, potentially, part of a Cog Hyp approach. In any one session you could be ‘doing’ CBT, NLP, counselling, Parts, Gestalt etc, singly or in combination. You’re only limited by your knowledge of those options, its appropriateness for your client, and your creativity.

There are many great counsellors and psychotherapists working out there, and I think many are limited by the fact that every approach seems to develop an orthodoxy over time. All begin with certain assumptions that determine the way its practitioners work. Often in the beginning these assumptions are novel, revolutionary, and even threatening to the ‘establishment’ – as Mark Twain said, “All truth begins as heresy.” And I think that’s the problem. Every approach, from Freud onward, began as a heresy – a contrast to the established order. But, for me, the danger comes when it’s accepted as ‘truth’, because once something becomes ‘true’ it becomes set in stone. Our brains like certainty, so it becomes immensely attractive to feel you are following the ‘right’ way – and feels wrong if people don’t. Usually the approach develops guidelines to prevent people doing things ‘wrong’, which over time become rules, which over time become holy writ. The assumptions become the commandments, the originator becomes the prophet, the approach becomes the church, and the rules become the law. And other churches that aren’t your own become…

Let’s look at some of the assumptions:

I find in counselling the idea that ‘change takes time’ is often mistaken as ‘a truth’. I trained a counsellor once who used a regression technique on a client who had been stuck for months in her problem. The change in a single session was marked. I got an email from the counsellor asking “But is it ethical to let people change that fast?” My response was, “Is it ethical to stop them if they find it possible?” If you enter a therapeutic relationship using your belief about time being a necessary part of change, you are infecting your client with a limitation. I don’t agree with that – and I feel the same about a therapist who forces on a client their belief that change ‘should’ be quick. Time is just another variable. Some problems develop over years, some emerge from a moment. I think solutions can operate within exactly the same time frame, it all depends on the context and the client.

For example, in cases of bereavement, very often a counselling-type approach is necessary to pace the grief, and would be much more appropriate for many people than a technique-driven brief approach. But not all. Choosing one as your default assumption is one way, using either according to the need of the client is Cognitive Hypnotherapy.

A second assumption – and not just amongst counsellors – is that exploring your feelings about your problem is a means of resolving it. Freud would no doubt agree – but maybe not if he had access to recent science. Reconsolidation theory suggests that every time you recall a memory (ie any event that’s happened other than the one that currently is) you render it unstable – i.e. capable of change. What kind of change is going to be possible if each time you think about it you just explore the same feelings? Surely it will just become more of what it was, and you’ll feel worse about it each and every time? If memories can change – in fact, if they can’t not, then change them for the better, don’t just keep describing them. There are techniques for this available within a range of approaches. And, at the same time, in cases like bereavement, just the verbalisation of your loss [I]can[/I] be a great help. Just not forever.

By contrast, an assumption from brief strategic therapy is that, in the main, talking about their problem won’t help – only exploring evidence for their improvement will . And that can be very successful, but, again, not with everyone. Choosing one as your default assumption is one way, using either according to the need of the client is Cognitive Hypnotherapy.

As a final example, in CBT the emerging orthodoxy increasingly seems to be emphasising the need to stick to agendas set at the beginning of a session, and to remain within a fixed protocol. This is just another example of the ‘heresy becoming truth’ problem. In their desire to base their approach on evidence that it works – which I applaud – they are stifling innovation and, like a lava flow, I think the progress of their approach will slow as it loses the heat you gain from innovation. The danger is that, when it grinds to a halt under the weight of its own assumptions, the belief will be that therapy has achieved all it can, rather than what it can when confined within a particular set of assumptions.

When I describe counselling as a backward step – and I’d generally describe psychotherapies in the same way – I really mean at an organisational level, not at an individual one. It’s because, as organisations, they have become churches in the way I described earlier. They look to preserve their beliefs rather than challenge them in the light of new evidence or ideas. Their approach is more of a faith than a science, and their congregation is fed assumptions as truth, and subtly pressured to conform to them.

So I’m not saying that counselling or any form of psychotherapy doesn’t work. In fact I’m saying the opposite. All approaches work. Just not on everyone, all the time, for all problems. Which is why I am going to keep passionately crusading for a unification of the churches into something that isn’t a church at all, and keep fighting anybody who tries to make their church the official faith. If anyone only offers counselling, or CBT,or Gestalt, or EFT or EMDR, or hypnotherapy then, in my view, they’re limiting what the client might achieve. And Cognitive Hypnotherapy is just an idea of how all these approaches might be incorporated into a flexible model of therapy that responds, moment by moment, to the emerging needs of the client.

And here’s the rub. If Cognitive Hypnotherapy becomes accepted to the degree that counselling and CBT has there will be a pressure to begin to view it as another ‘truth’. It could cease to be a heresy and become another church, and another limit to the potential of our clients.

To avoid this we have to find a way of remaining an organised, permanent, heresy. At the moment the only way I can think of achieving that is by tattooing our primary assumption on the inside of the eyelids of every one of our graduates. ‘Nothing is true.’ And remembering that in 100 years everything that we currently believe is cutting edge will seem archaic.

The response from the press was far in excess of what he hoped – but not in the way he’d intended. The press whipped themselves up into a frenzy over this example – in their view – of a lazy, fat, stupid, selfish man. Film crews from as far as Germany asked him for interviews, and the exposure got so bad that he felt intimidated leaving the house. Shopping became impossible. As a traffic warden he was used to being hated – but for the thing he did, not the person he was.

I heard about his story and offered to help. I’d recently been on the receiving end of a journalist happy to twist my message for a ten second headline so there was a sense of kindred spirits from the moment we met. I also hoped for the opportunity to make a point.

Everywhere I look I seem to see a story about how gastric surgery – bypass or band – is the solution to our obesity epidemic. At £12,000 a pop I can see why the surgeons are pushing for this to be true, but in my opinion it’s madness. We’ve hundreds of thousands of people who are obese, and we’re going to cut them open. Seriously?

I’ve worked with people with weight issues for nearly twenty years, and I’ve had many clients who learned to respond to bad experiences through a distorted relationship to food – some by restricting their intake, some by doing the opposite. my strong belief is that gastric surgery might help an unhappy fat person lose weight, but without addressing the psychological reason why they overeat in the first place what you’ll have afterwards is just an unhappy less fat person. In essence you’re just sticking a plaster over the problem and I think it’s likely that the continued unhappiness will often lead to another harmful behaviour.

The whole concept of surgery perpetuates the idea that food is the enemy and our body is a battleground – that’s it’s purely a physical problem to be solved. But food is just energy and a thing we enjoy the taste of. In my opinion, if it has any greater significance in your life it has ceased to be food and become a symbol for something else – like love, company, comfort, rebellion, or safety.

What I’m suggesting is that many people have formed an emotional relationship to food as an antidote to feelings they experienced about themselves when they were younger. 90% of what we do is driven by the unconscious – at least that’s what scientists are saying – and I think that includes those times when we are driven to act in ways we wouldn’t consciously choose. That includes pretty much every problem clients bring to therapy: being scared of things most people aren’t, feeling anxious when most people aren’t, doing things that you’d like not to – like smoking or under/overeating – or not being able to do things that you would like to. They are all responses driven by your unconscious. The good news is that they all have a positive intention. Your unconscious is trying to protect you, it’s just doing so based on some faulty programming from when you were younger. Fix the programming and you fix the problem.

So Darin came to see me. We had one session and he identified the source of his connection to food and changed it. I recorded a download for him to listen to every night – similar to the ones dozens of people have lost weight with since they were launched on the Thinkingslimmer site. Did it work for him? Well, Darin responded to his experience with the press in the same way I did. He’s blogging about it. You can read how he’s doing now here.

What I want you to pay most attention to is his attitude. It’s great that he’s getting slimmer – but it’s even more important that he’s getting happier. Feeling in control of his choices is a key element of that, and his ability to change his attitude to food becomes a great symbol of his ability to change his life. If you can change the thing that has defined you for most of your adult life, what else are you capable of achieving? Helping clients answer that question is one of the things that keeps me loving what I do. In my opinion the world is going to see a very different Darin in the future.

Would this work with everyone? Of course not, nothing does, and I’m not saying that all weight issues are psychologically driven – for where that’s not the case gastric bands may even be the answer.

But if you have a problem I’d invite you to apply my description of where they come from to it and see if it resonates with you, because if it does, my message is you can change. Our minds are plastic, they’re changing all the time. The only problem is, if faulty programming is driving the change you tend to become more of what you don’t want to be. Darin is a good example of how, if you’re helped to write your own program, you can become much more of who you would like to be. Seeing a Cognitive Hypnotherapist could be where the re-writing of yourself begins.

It is based on the idea that many psychological problems are caused by unconscious biases. For example, if a brain has an attentional bias towards threats it’s likely to lead to anxiety. An obvious example of a more specific bias would be a phobia, where the brain is strongly biased to find an object like a dog or a spider threatening, or a situation frightening , like public speaking.

What CBM is looking to achieve is to alter these biases, and they’ve found doing so is surprisingly simple (of course I would say, so have we). Their approach is to sit someone in front of a computer screen and show them two words or pictures, one neutral and one negative – so in the case of someone with social anxiety it could be a neutral face and a threatening face. Clearly their bias will cause them to automatically focus on the threatening face. The computer program, however, causes them to complete tasks involving the neutral picture. Repeating this procedure around a thousand times over a two hour period retrains the brain to no longer focus on the negative – and that change is carried back into the world.

I found this interesting because in Cognitive Hypnotherapy we also focus on such biases. We believe that all behaviour has a purpose, so any negative behaviour that a client wants to change is the result of an unconscious bias the brain has learnt to value. Negative behaviour is just the brains response to something it’s learnt to believe is relevant to our survival. I’ll give an example: We all have moments in our life when we’ve felt that we’re not as good as other people (or is it just me, my students and my clients?). This can lead to us experiencing various degrees of fear – of rejection, or failure – or anxiety, or anger or jealousy. The list goes on.

My point is that each of us will respond to what happens to us in a unique, and not entirely predictable way as our attentional biases develop based on the meaning we give to the things that happen to us. An experience of childhood abuse may turn one person into an abuser, and the other into a social worker. A perception of rejection could lead to someone becoming celibate or promiscuous, a feeling of being unloved to a life of obesity or anorexia. And the fact that all of the negative events could lead to any one of the problems described is why we do not believe in diagnosing problems. Labels limit. Each client has arrived at their problem behaviour through a unique series of life events, and each is maintained by a unique pattern of thoughts and behaviours. In Cognitive Hypnotherapy we map this problem pattern and match it to interventions from a range of approaches that fit the client – not the label – in order to change their biases. CBM is a welcome addition, and we see Cognitive Hypnotherapy as a model that informs therapists about which choices are most likely to work with which client, rather than see each approach as a silver bullet aimed at a particular diagnosis.

I think it’s inevitable that in our life journey our brain is bound to develop these attentional biases: some things in our environment will be viewed as more relevant to us than others because of what the brain has learnt (or mis-learnt) they represent – that food is love, people equal danger, or cigarettes equal company. Our brain is plastic, so anything can become associated with any meaning – which is why you might be the only person in the room who stands on a chair in the presence of a mouse, or who stuffs cake after an emotional day.

We suggest these negative behaviours arise because, if the relevance is accompanied by a strong emotional reaction, the bias could lead to control being wrenched away from you by your unconscious and it launching you into an automatic action intended to protect or reward you; an action you have little or no control over. For want of a better word we call this a trance. A jealous rage, eating the chocolate that you know you don’t need, smoking the fag you want to quit, running away from the thing you shouldn’t be afraid of, becoming tongue tied in the presence of someone you want to impress; in Cognitive Hypnotherapy they’re all examples of trance states the unconscious generates in order to control your actions.

On our hypnotherapy courses we train our therapists to identify these trance states, and we teach a wide variety of techniques to help each client adapt their biases so the unconscious no longer feels the need to respond to a situation that used to be negative. In effect we’re ‘de-hypnotists’: we enable the client to remain awake and in control of their actions during the times when they used to be at the mercy of their biases. And then we go further. We help them introduce attentional biases into their unconscious that leads to them becoming more aware of everything around them that would be evidence of their improvement. How much better would you life be if your unconscious was tuned to choose first those things around you that leave you feeling loved, secure, safe and happy? We think that’s eminently doable.

Zaki, Schirmer and Mitchell, three psychological scientists from Harvard University had men look at 180 images of women and rate their attractiveness. As they did so a score was flashed on the screen beside their score, indicating how several hundred other male participants in the experiment had voted. In reality a computer randomly assigned a number higher or lower than their vote if they had judged someone particularly unattractive or attractive. They were then shown the same pictures again and asked to revote. Unerringly, if the other participants had voted higher than them, they revised their score upwards. If the opposite was true, they revised it lower. Amazingly, how attractive you find someone is influenced by the opinion of those around you.

This unconscious need to conform has massive implications in our daily lives. I was reminded of another study which showed that hanging out with fat friends led to you putting on weight. It seems we unconsciously seek to adapt to the norm, because, from an evolutionary point of view, what is different to the group is potentially dangerous to the group. You see it in the way people in groups tend to dress similarly, adopt an ‘in’ language and imitate physical actions and expressions – especially of those higher up the hierarchy. Experiments have shown on numerous occasions that, after a group has formed, they begin to discriminate against people outside of that group in a very short space of time. No wonder we do what we can to demonstrate that we ‘belong’.

So, if our brains are geared to adapt our behavior, our beliefs and values, and even our appearance according to our environment, how can we use this to be happier, or more successful, or healthier?

I suggest you look first at your network of friends. What might your brain be adapting to there? Are they positive people? Supportive? Do they encourage you to achieve your dreams? Do they exemplify the physical and mental traits that you aspire to? If they don’t, it could be why you feel like you’re less than you could be. Jim Rohn says, “You are the average of the five people you spend most time with.” If that’s true, who are that five, and is that the best you can do?

Let’s widen our focus. What characters on TV do you aim your unconscious at? Is your brain adapting you to become more like a character from Eastenders? Or Big Brother? I’ve definitely found that in the years since I stopped watching soaps and reality TV my outlook on life has changed for the better, and now I find them unbearably negative. The same goes for newspapers. I stopped reading them because I realised they never left me feeling better about the world. What do you watch, and read, and listen to? What message does it send your brain about who you should best be to survive? Whatever flows through our senses is our environment, and never in the history of humanity has there been more information available to choose from for that flow. The message is clear. If you want to be the best version of you can be, feed your brain the raw material to make you from. Watch a TED lecture instead of an episode of Coronation Street. Read something inspiring or aspirational instead of the Daily Miserable, go for a walk instead of sitting with a slice of cake, and audit your friends – spend more time with people who make you feel better about yourself and the world and who exemplify what you want for yourself, and ration the time you spend with friends who don’t.

What people who come on our hypnotherapy training often find is that the amazingly positive atmosphere, both in the classroom and on our forums – which usually get over a thousand page loads a day – in a subtle way begins to change their beliefs about what they can achieve. And now I can tell them why.

I’ve been wearing one for several months. In fact I’ve worn two at different times: one I bought from their website, and one my son bought on EBay for £2 – ie a fake. The interesting thing is, I found that they both caused a measurable improvement in my performance – especially in my range of motion when kickboxing. What is particularly perplexing – and you’ll have to trust that I’m not just being wise after the event – is that I thought the science behind their claim was baloney from the start.

So why wear something you don’t believe in? Because it’s not me who has to believe it, it’s my unconscious mind that has to be fooled – and that’s not difficult.

Recent research has overturned the notion that the placebo effect only works if the person it is being used on isn’t aware of its nature. Prof. Ted Kaptchuk of Harvard Medical School divided a group of 80 IBS sufferers into two groups. One group received nothing, the other received tablets they were told were”placebo pills made of an inert substance, like sugar pills, that have been shown in clinical studies to produce significant improvement in IBS-symptoms through mind-body self-healing processes”. It even had ‘placebo’ printed on the bottle.

After three weeks almost twice as many patients treated with the placebo showed a significant relief of their symptoms compared to the control group.

I believe this happened for the same reason people get an effect from the Power balance band – even when they know it’s nonsense, and even when they know it’s fake nonsense.

We like to think of ourselves as logical and rational – and of course we can be, given the time. However, 90% of the actions we take are driven by the unconscious, and research is showing that it doesn’t use logic to decide on our responses to things, because the evolutionary drive that caused it to develop was based on a need to make rapid survival responses. So it uses a number of algorithms – calculations that lead to predictable outcomes. Some were identified by the Czech mathematician George Polya – he called them ‘patterns of plausible inference’. Others were described in psychologist Prof. Gerd Giggarenzer’s book Gut Feelings. He called them rules of thumb. Yet more were described by a world authority in the science of persuasion, Professor Robert Cialdini. They have come to be called Alpha Strategies. Simply put, they are the means by which we become unconsciously convinced by something – and it’s now recognised that the convincing is done largely out of our awareness, which is why the advertising industry uses them to sell us products, and why ‘neuromarketing’ is attracting a lot of attention. They can be very effective but, because they are designed to decide things quickly, they can be error-prone.

In the case of their being convinced that Power Balance bands work, for your unconscious, seeing is believing. There is a simple demonstration that ‘shows’ it increases people’s strength. I’ve done it on dozens of people – and I know that it works if I also use another object instead of the band (like a tangerine). However, the fact that the unconscious sees a demonstration that plausibly infers a quality possessed by the band, then it is likely to accept that quality as a fact. It’s a little like the visual illusion I’ve included here. Even when you prove to your conscious satisfaction that the balls in the centre are the same size you are still unable to update your impression that they are different. It can be the same with our problems. The change has to be convincing to the unconscious, and to convince it you have to play by its algorithms.

With the placebo experiment there are probably other algorithms at work. We have been conditioned to accept the notion that taking a pill will make us better, so even the symbolism of doing so can invoke a healing response. An Alpha strategy focuses on the power authority has to convince us – so in an experimental situation our unconscious is highly suggestible to people in white coats (for example). The word placebo has no effect, the factors that create it unconsciously do.

This is very important in Cognitive Hypnotherapy. We utilise these patterns all the time in our work with clients to influence their unconscious in such a way that they become convinced of their improvement. Our whole treatment planning is based around three core algorithms we call TAOTM (the algorithms of the mind) of which the others I’ve mentioned are examples. We uncover the patterns that are supporting the client’s issue and work to change them, and we identify the patterns that would convince them they’re getting better and we work to replace their problem patterns with their solution patterns.

We think the key thing is to do so at the unconscious level. Using our conscious, logical thinking can lead to a rewriting of the unconscious inferences that create our issues, but it tends to be hard work and quite clunky, and takes longer. Working more directly with the source of the issue – the unconscious – not only tends to bring benefits more quickly, it tends to be perceived as an easier process by the client.

So, don’t worry if people mock you for your magnetic bracelet, or your power balance band, or your healing crystal. If your unconscious has taken a shine to it, just enjoy the benefit you feel it brings. And remember that the problem that seems so hard to shift is just the result of the calculations your unconscious is making. The brain is plastic, these patterns can be changed, you can improve. I explain how in more detail in my new book.

The trouble is, the minute you label a person’s problem you change it into something more than it is, or less than it is. It’s the nature of people to seek to give things names, but I think in therapy this can be extremely limiting. People do not fit neatly into boxes, any more than a list of symptoms to tick can fully conceptualise the individuals’ experience of their issue. In my opinion to work from the basis that therapeutic treatment should be dictated by a diagnosis leads us into stagnant waters. Let me explain why:

For someone to be diagnosed with a label like depression, or PTSD or anxiety disorder they have to have someone qualified to diagnose. For that person to be qualified they have to have a set of criteria to match against the clients symptoms. To be able to use that criteria they need to belong to an organisation that has agreed them. So we arrive at a situation where an organisation trains people to label other people through a set of agreed boxes to tick. Human nature being what it is, it isn’t long before, because they’ve labelled the problem, the members of that organisation begin to think they own it. It’s only a short step before the diagnosticians make the leap of saying that because they are the only people who can label the condition, they’re the only people who can treat it. A neat wall is soon built around the issue, policed by those within. And to prove that they have a right to deal exclusively with the sufferers they design experimental studies that rely on the diagnosis, and, to be scientific, they match specific protocols to each condition they want to own. Any therapist inside the wall has to stick to ‘the way’ of dealing with the problem, or else the results of their work can’t be considered ‘evidence’ of ‘the way’ working.

in the case of CBT , on the plus side, the evidence shows that the protocols work. On the negative side, they show they don’t work on everyone with the label, or completely in many cases – but still they’re pushing the government to only allow those approaches (i.e. within their wall) to be used for certain conditions. So what becomes of those not helped by CBT? At the moment they can come to someone else like me, but it seems that CBT is looking to close the door and exclude anybody using any approach that doesn’t fit their evidential criteria (i.e.that set by them to prove the efficacy of CBT).

At a recent NCH training event a senior CBT therapist told the audience that there was no evidence to support the use of NLP. In that audience were probably at least 20 people who were phobia or habit free – at the least – because of an NLP intervention. Couldn’t a raising of hands in that context be taken as evidence? From his position, no, because the approach used on each person had too many unknown variables for the conclusion to be safe. Zzzzzzzzzzz. And yet the 20 remain phobia or habit-free.

I think they could do with a dose of uncertainty.

In Cognitive Hypnotherapy we have taken the opposite path. We avoid a set way of working with set labels. We do not diagnose because:
a) We’re not qualified to – i.e. we haven’t jumped through the hoops to get inside the wall, and, more importantly,
b) We believe that every single person given a label doesn’t fit it exactly, and that those differences could be the key to their recovery.

So, if any client says “I have X (anxiety, depression, PTSD)”, our response is “How do you do that?” and we ask specific questions to identify and isolate the unique way the client creates and conceptualises their issue. From the understanding that arises from this process emerges a range of treatment options. And from CBT’s perspective that is a problem for us.

In Cognitive Hypnotherapy the flexibility that arises from the belief that there is no single protocol that works on all people, and that there are probably several different ways of achieving the same result with each client, means that it’s difficult to create an experiment to ‘evidence’ our approach in the way that CBT can. We like variables. We like creativity. We like using anything that works from anywhere. We follow the dictum of Perls and the great Gil Boyne to ‘deal with what emerges’ and don’t treat a client’s diversion from an agreed agenda as something to manage, but as something to investigate. How on earth do you evidence that? How do you evidence a therapy session where four different techniques might be strung together in response to what emerges during the therapy process? In a world where ‘one-size-fits-all’ approaches are held up as the gold standard, suddenly the skill that enables a flexible and creative solution for any client who can’t be squeezed into the approach becomes a thing to be avoided, derided, and even feared. Orthodoxy becomes prized, innovation avoided.

I think we need a change of philosophy.

In a recent exercise conducted by the magazine Edge, scientists and philosophers were asked their opinion on the question “What scientific concept would improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit?” Overwhelmingly the answer was to be comfortable with uncertainty, know the limits of what science can tell us, and understand the worth of failure. It came at a very good moment for me; embracing uncertainty was a key theme in my latest book, Cognitive Hypnotherapy: What’s that about and How can I use it? Two simple questions for change.

As Neil Gershenfield, a director at MIT says, “The most common understanding about science is that scientists seek and find truth. They don’t – they make and test models. Building models is very different from proclaiming truths. It’s a never-ending process of discovery and refinement, not a war to win or destination to reach. Uncertainty is intrinsic to the process of finding out what you don’t know, not a weakness to avoid. Bugs are features – violations of expectations are opportunities to refine them. And decisions are made by evaluating what works better, not by invoking received wisdom.”

Nothing works on everybody. Everything works on somebody. Any research should be with the intention of creating better and better models from what works – from whatever approach it emerges – until we reach therapy Nirvana, not use it to try to exclude approaches other than our own, or convince government that our way is the only way. If CBT manages to convince the powers-that-be as well as they seem to be convincing themself then what we could be left with is the exclusion of other ideas that have their place in the evolution of therapy – which can only be to the detriment of those in need. That is where I fear the current situation with CBT is leading.

We’re about to begin a research programme to show that the flexibility of Cognitive Hypnotherapy works – in a form that NICE and anybody else in the mainstream will accept – but what we want to come from it is to also show where it falls short and where it can be improved. Failure is simply information that can lead to improvement. And in the gathering of information we need to recognise what science is good at quantifying, and what it isn’t, and choose our evidential methods according to what is acceptably compelling, rather than purely scientifically measurable.

Imagine a world where all the walls erected around different therapies were taken down and we shared what we know – including that we don’t know enough.

In my book I finished with this: “Therapy should be a unified field bound by a communal curiosity about what can make us more skilled at being human. That’s what I want Cognitive Hypnotherapy to be about; permanent revolution driven by curiosity, united by uncertainty, guided by evidence, and always in a state of growth.”

It’s something to work for, isn’t it?

As someone who uses words as the tools of my trade, this area is obviously of great interest. I wrote Wordweaving: The Science of Suggestion in 2003 to describe a model for creating hypnotic suggestion that moves away from using a set script based on the client’s problem, to a flexible system that allows you to spontaneously create suggestions within a session, based, not on the label the client has for their issue, but on the individual way the client will have of experiencing that issue.

What I was heartened to see in a recent article in New Scientist on the power of words to mould our perceptions was research that validates some of the key principles within WordweavingTM and Cognitive Hypnotherapy.

For example, one experiment showed that subjects who were exposed to a word for a hidden object were more likely to notice it in their visual field. It seems that the words we use for things primes our brains to become more aware of something around us, even if it’s not immediately obvious. I describe this phenomenon as ‘what is on your mind is brought to mind’, and the primer can be from any sense – a picture, feeling, smell etc – but the finding that 80% of our thoughts are verbal raises the likelihood that words will be particularly powerful. Further, when subjects were shown two different versions of an object, one the right way up and the other inverted, and tasked with identifying which was upright, they were able to do so faster when the objects were given a name. So it seems that our unconscious will bring to our awareness things around us that we’ve been primed by its name to notice, and that we will recognise such things faster if we have a name to put to them. But what’s that got to do with therapy?

In Cognitive Hypnotherapy our first task with clients is to identify what we call their problem pattern – four distinct ways of describing their thoughts and experiences that cause their issue. From this we’ll be able to make a decision about what is the best technique, or combination of them, that is most likely to help that particular client – so five clients with the same label (such as fear of dogs, or smoking, or low self-esteem) are likely to get a different set of interventions tailored to their unique mindset.

This is what tends to be called a problem-focussed strategy. But that’s only half of our first step. The next is to identify their solution state. Essentially this is the response to the question, “What would your life be like without your problem? How would you know it had gone?” This is called a solution-focussed approach. We think it’s vital to cover both bases. What is particularly important to us about the solution state is that it’s not simply the absence of their problem –“I wouldn’t be scared” – but what would fill the space the problem occupied: “I’d be relaxed, confident, happy” etc. Thus the journey the client embarks on with us is one that takes them from their problem to their solution.

One of the ways we achieve this is especially relevant to the research I mentioned earlier. We think it’s very important that the client’s solution state comes from the client, not from the therapist’s idea of what the solution should be, so we take careful note of the words the client uses in response to the questions we ask. So if a client says, “If I didn’t have my problem I’d be able to breathe in company, I’d feel relaxed around people and be more confident,” I’d be making a note of the words ‘able to breathe’,’ relaxed around people’ and ‘more confident’ and use them in a WordweavingTM ‘suggestion pattern that I deliver to my client – and probably record for them to listen to after the session.

A portion of it might go something like, “…and as the days go by you might begin to notice more and more opportunities around you for you to be able to breathe in the way that’s important to you…so naturally that it might only be afterwards, looking back, that you realise how much more relaxed you were around the people you met…in a way that seemed so natural that you might not even be aware of your confidence growing with your relaxation…bit by bit…more and more…and that just means that it’s working…you’re becoming who you want to be..” etc.

What the research I mentioned suggests to me is that, by using the client’s words for things they want to experience, their unconscious is more likely to bring to the client’s conscious awareness things from their surroundings that match their meaning of the words they use – because in most cases the evidence for these words is around them already, (for example, a pessimist and an optimist live in the same world but choose to interpret information differently) it’s just that their mind is primed for words connected to their problem, not their solution. By switching their attention, the evidence for their problem disappears and the solution state becomes the world they live in, more and more. It’s why I think that the client’s choice of words are more important – and powerful – then the therapist’s choice of words.

Also notice that the words I use are words that describe states of mind, or concepts – like confidence, relaxation, power, focus, calmness or peace, but I avoid nouns – i.e. words that provide concrete ‘things’. So I might say, “…how you might be surprised at how many things begin to appear in your life that help to grow your confidence…”, but I won’t say, “so soon you might know you’re growing in confidence because you’re driving home in your Porsche with Jennifer Anniston (or Brad Pitt) beside you.” Even if that’s what the client says their ultimate goal is. The solution state needs to be independent of ‘things’. It’s not about what you have, it’s about who you are and how you feel. If you prime the mind at that conceptual level it leaves your unconscious a huge range of possibilities about what ‘things’ can fit the bill – which doesn’t exclude Brad or Jan, but isn’t dependent on it being them alone.

This is an example of how I’m interested in Cognitive Hypnotherapy developing – taking note of things from science that give us clues about what might help our clients, and then developing a model to test them.

It’s well-known that stem cells can become any kind of cell in the body, but the mechanism for how it achieves this amazing trick isn’t understood. Now researchers have found that stem cells may use its environment to give it clues about its purpose. For example, if you place stem cells in a current of liquid they turn into blood vessels.

I found this a very exciting discovery, because it validates the expectations of a theory of Bruce Lipton, the author of The Biology of Belief. In this book Lipton claims that what is called the Central Dogma of Biology – that our DNA is responsible for what happens to us – is wrong. Instead he puts forward an idea that suggests the primacy of the environment – that our DNA does nothing unless it receives a message from an environmental signal to do so. In another blog article I’ve described how this gives us – Cognitive Hypnotherapists – a model to work with that provides a scientific rationale for the principle that the mind can have a physical effect on the body, i.e. that our suggestions can cause a positive response on the health of our clients. But what this latest discovery gives us is an idea about how specifically to achieve that.

To see how far stem cells used their surroundings to inform their purpose, researchers developed gell pads of varying degrees of stiffness, and grew mesenchymal stem cells (the ones responsible for becoming many types of human tissue, including muscle, bone and nerves). The cells growing on the flabbiest gels became nerve cells. Gel pads 10 times stiffer produced muscle cells, and even stiffer ones led to bone. Clearly stem cells can feel their environment.

This is very exciting because it holds out the prospect of biologists being able to ‘grow’ new organs, body parts and nerve endings for people by manipulating the environment of a patient’s stem cells in a laboratory. In the future we may be able to simply grow spare parts.

But how does this affect us as therapists? Well, many tumours are stiffer then the surrounding tissue – it’s how doctors often first notice many forms of cancer during a physical exam. Where in the past this stiffness was assumed to be an effect of the cancer, now it’s being proposed that the cancer may be an effect of the stiffness. A team of biophysists at the University of Pennsylvania found that cancer cells stopped multiplying when they are grown on a soft gel. Anything that signals stiffness – even touching it with something rigid – can be enough to start it dividing again.

Still, the question remains, how can we use this knowledge?

One of the key ways that Cognitive Hypnotherapists work with healing issues, like cancer and multiple sclerosis, is to develop with the client a visualisation. The intention of it is to guide the natural healing processes we all possess toward a specific purpose. For example, cancer clients have imagined their tumours being washed in a washing machine where the detergent was the colour they represent as their healing energy, or as blood cells being on a conveyor belt and being kept healthy all the way through their production, in the case of leukaemia. This form of visualisation has been used for many years – and probably forms the root of many ancient healing systems too. What I think is particularly important is that the idea for the visualisation comes from the imagination of the client, not the therapist, because I think their imagination is our most potent weapon, not mine.

Does it work? Obviously I wouldn’t be taking the time to write this if I didn’t think so, and I have many anecdotal case studies of people going into remission, or slowing the progress of their disease, but it’s not proof that would satisfy science because I don’t see clients as part of a controlled study. Like anything else, nothing works for everybody, and I’m not suggesting this as a new wonder treatment, just an option. All I’m doing is offering this as a possible route for those people who are seeking something to complement their treatment outside the realms of the medical, in the knowledge that the worst it can do is nothing. It comes with no guarantees, but taking a personal part in your treatment does give a stronger sense of control, which research shows is a powerful factor in experiencing a more positive quality of life – itself a factor in healing.

I strongly believe that we should be looking towards science for ideas and clues to guide our work, and this is one instance where it has. What the discovery of the fact that our stem cells feel what they should become has led me to incorporate into my client-work is the idea of them visualising their cancer cells being surrounded by whatever, for them, would be the softest thing they can imagine. In the Wordweaving style of suggestion I developed it could go something like this:

“so as you imagine your cancer cells…in whatever way you do…holding them in your imagination for a moment so that your unconscious can clearly know where to focus your natural healing power…and as you do imagine them surrounded…by whatever would be the softest thing you can imagine…enveloped and gently supported by it…the surface of the softness in contact with the cancer…and just focus on all the qualities of the softness that make it what it is…its colour…any shape it has…how it feels…anything it reminds you of…all the qualities that focus your unconscious in the most powerful and positive way…on healing…so that as the cancer learns from its soft contact…how you might begin to imagine it changing…absorbing the lessons of the softness…becoming the softness…so that in and out of your awareness…in every moment of the day…your unconscious mind can continue to surround…them in this way…with a new way of becoming…

I’ve recorded a free download for people with cancer to listen to to guide them through a visualisation using this principle, and the others I’ve picked up along the way. You’ll can download it here here. And I would love to hear from anybody who uses it and finds it of benefit, because if we can take a scientific discovery and integrate it into a Cognitive Hypnotherapy approach that works for people it raises our credibility within that community and who knows, we may be able to gather enough benefit to convince those who are open to being convinced.

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.