Doug O'Brien's Blog

"Who you are being is so loud I can't hear what you are saying."

         - Marc Anthony Yhap to Dr.Graham Dorrington in "The White Diamond"

Some of the more popular NLP classes I teach are classes on persuasion. The "Sleight of Mouth" class, "Belief Craft" with Jonathan Altfeld, "The Language of Change" (Ericksonian Hypnotic Language Patterns), and the new "Heart-Centered Sales System" all deal with persuasion.

That's fine. It's a useful study because everything requires persuasion... sales, doing therapy, relationships, pretty much every activity that involves humans interacting will require some form of persuasion. And it is useful to remind ourselves that persuasion techniques alone don't make somebody persuasive. Sales techniques take a back seat to being able to relate meaningfully to another human being and being able to establish a deep rapport between you both.

Intention has a Scent
Have you ever had the experience of being with an experienced salesman who was doing his whole shtick and it just felt creepy? IF you bought anything from him, you probably questioned whether you really wanted it or needed it or if it really was what it was claimed to be. This would be because we pick up on non-verbal communication, at least subconsciously. He was probably a master of sales techniques and maybe even hypnotic language patterns, but your other-than-conscious mind saw through the act. You smelled a rat.

Rapport - REAL rapport - is the secret to being truly persuasive. Because real rapport flows, not from rapport techniques, but from actually caring about and actually connecting with another human being.

The Notes or the Music
I devoted much of my early years to the study and performance of music. I was a piano and composition major in college, attended a year at the Guildhall Conservatory in London and performed at Carnegie Hall, among other places.

One thing required of all instrumentalists is the practice of scales. Mastering scales is essential for any instrumentalist who wants to really get close to mastering their instrument. However, no one, no matter how good you are at your scales, will pay you to play them. They will come to the concert hall to hear Beethoven or Bach, but not scales. The MUSIC is not in getting the notes right, it's HOW you play those notes. Music is the soul and sensitivity of the music expressed THROUGH the notes.

In the same way, if you have a real caring for the person with whom you are interacting and sincerely have their interests in mind, then the techniques will serve you. I'm reminded of Santa Claus in Miracle on 34th Street. It's not about selling what Macy's HAS, it's about helping the customer get what they want... even if you have to send the to Gimble's.

Think about it. Just like in music, you don't want to have to pick between getting the notes right or being emotionally expressive, you want both. (And isn't it nice to know that you can enjoy both at the same time?)

How Many Sessions Will This Take?

People are attracted to short term therapy models like NLP and Hypnosis because of the promise of getting the change completed as quickly as possible. And why shouldn't they? If you have a headache you want the aspirin to work quickly and make you feel better now, not spend for a few months talking about the pain. So a very commonly asked question is "How many sessions will this take?"

Of all the things I've learned about personal change in a therapeutic context, it is that everyone is different and there is no absolute answer to the question of how many sessions will be required.
After all, you don't just want it done quickly, you want it done thoroughly and you want it done right.

However, there is some interesting data to be found on the subject. In Jonathan Alpert's new book, "Be Fearless: Change your Life in 28 Days," the author sites a 2001 study published in the Journal of Counseling Psychology that states that patients improved most dramatically between their seventh and tenth sessions. Another study, published in 2006 in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology found that 88 percent improved after just one session but that the rate falls to 62 percent after twelve. The author concludes that, "The longer psychotherapy takes, the less likely it is to be effective."

NLP, of course, is more than a simple style of therapy. In fact, it is only because the originators of NLP chose to model therapists that we have what many think of as "NLP Therapy." Nevertheless, it works. in my practice, the use of NLP and Neo-Ericksonian Hypnosis help to make sessions goal oriented and solution oriented and facilitate getting the outcome the client desires as elegantly as possible.

Sometimes that is just one session. Often is it at least two sessions, because we want to make certain things are progressing properly. Sometimes I see clients for multiple sessions about more than one issue. Always we are seeking to reach specific goals and to build life skills that the client can apply in many contexts.

Neo-Ericksonian Approaches to change work

Often, when I get enquiries about a specific complaint like blushing or tinnitus (ringing in the ear), people want to know exactly what I'm going to do for them. I can appreciate their wanting to know but, ironically, the best answer to that question is probably not the answer they are looking for.

They want definite, distinct treatment steps, like they might expect from a medical approach. But, in reality, the best answer to that question for an NLP Practitioner of Hypnotherapist is "I don't know." Because part of the power of NLP and Neo-Ericksonian Hypnosis is that it is tailored specifically for the individual. No two people are alike, so no two treatments should be alike either. You can't really know what we're going to do with a particular client until we meet that client.

As an example from the case studies of Milton Erickson, he worked with three different children who all had the same problem - bed-wetting. Instead of dusting off the "How to Treat Bedwetting" hypnosis script, Erickson treated each person uniquely. It is interesting to note that in all of the cases below no hypnosis, (as we normally think of it), was used. It was, however, because of Erickson's deep understanding of how the mind works, vis-a-vis trance, that he was able to produce these successful results.

Here are summaries of the three different cases. 

Case #1: A twelve year old boy was brought to Erickson for bedwetting. Ericksondismissed his parents, so he was just there with the kid, and immediately began talking to the boy about other topics, avoiding a discussion of bedwetting altogether. Upon learningthat the boy played baseball and his brother played football, Erickson began to describe the fine muscle coordination it takes to play baseball compared to gross, uncoordinatedmuscle skills used in football. The boy listened raptly as Erickson described in some detail all the fine muscle adjustments his body made automatically in order to position hisself underneath the ball and to catch it. 

The glove has to be opened up at just the right moment and clamped down again at justthe right moment. When transferring the ball to the other hand, the same kind of finemuscle control is needed. Then, when throwing the ball to the infield, if one lets go too soon, it doesn’t go where one wants it to go, likewise, letting go too late leads to frustration. Letting go at just the right time, gets it to go where you want it go and that constitutes success, in baseball. 

Case #2: In this next case, a twelve year old boy was in an intense struggle with his mother over continued wetting of the bed. Erickson gave the mother an assignment of waking herself up at 4 or 5 in the morning to check whether her son’s bed was wet or dry. If it was dry, she was to just let him sleep and go back to bed without waking him. If was wet, she was to get the boy up and have him practice his handwriting, which was very poor, until 7 am. Not only was the symptom resolved but the boy’s relationship with his father and his grades at school improved. 

Case #3: An eleven year old girl that has been cytoscoped so many times for her urinary tract problems that she has lost her ability to control her bladder sphincter. She wouldwet her pants if she ran or laughed during the day and she wet the bed at night. Her sisters, the neighbor kids and kids at school had discovered her weakness and took delight in making her wet her pants. Aren’t kids wonderful? She was miserable about the situation. Erickson told her that she already knew had to have dry beds and dry pants. She told him that he was wrong. He told her that she already knew but that she did not know that she knew. Well, she was perplexed by that. He asked her in a rather dramatic fashion what she would do if she were sitting on the toilet urinating and a strange man poked his head into the bathroom. She replied that she would freeze. Erickson agreed and told her that this was what she knew that she didn’t know that she knew. All she had to do, he said, was to use this ability and to practice starting and stopping when she was urinating. She developed her muscle rapidly and was having dry beds and pants within a short time. 

Good thing these patients didn't demand to know what Milton was going to do before they came in. They might never have made it.

Dr. Milton Erickson, MD, the great hypnotist and psychiatrist, once said, "every human being is as unique as their own thumbprint." 

 So, when people ask me what to expect from an NLP or Hypnosis session, I tell them the unvarnished truth - even though it is often not what they really want to hear.

What they want to hear is something like this, "This problem will be eliminated after the completion of our 5 step process." Or maybe, "Oh, it'll take one session of 30 minutes and then all your troubles will be permanently eliminated." Or "It's very simple, I put you into a trance and, although you won't remember a thing, when you wake up your challenges will be gone forever." 

I sincerely do wish it were that easy, but unvarnished truth is that there literally is no way of knowing for certain.

Sometimes a client's issues CAN be rectified in one session but sometimes more sessions are required. Sometimes it takes two or three, or even more sessions to get thing the way we want them to be. Every case is unique. The fact of the matter is, that as apt a metaphor as it is that our minds are like computers, we are not computers and our patterns of behavior and ways of thinking cannot be simply reprogrammed. 

So, since, as Milton Erickson observed, we are, all of us, unique, it is only right that results of a hypnosis or NLP session will vary between clients.

And HOW that session is conducted will vary between clients.

That is, in fact, a good thing.

One of the reasons NLP and Ericksonian hypnosis are so powerful is BECAUSE we can recognize and appreciate the differences between people and how to interface with those differences that we can claim such great results.

Think of it this way. Let's go back to the metaphor that the brain is like a computer. 

Say your computer acts up and you take it into the fix-it shop. If the technician thinks, "all computers are the same" and starts taking your apart and treating your 1998 Macintosh as if it were a 2010 HP PC, you'd be in trouble.

You want a technician who can properly diagnose that problem and figure out the best way of proceeding for your PARTICULAR circumstance. 

 It is the same with NLP and Hypnosis. You want a practitioner with the training and experience to notice and utilize who you are in all your uniqueness to help you get where you want to go. It make be an instant change, it may take a while, but 9 times out of 10, if it can be changed, a good NLP Practitioner or Ericksonian Hypnotherapist can help make it so.