Estudios sobre el cuerpo y cuerpo como territorio de paz

• What resources does the person have that can make a bridge from the Present State to the Outcome State.

The materials in this manual and the accompanying audio seminar are © Street Hypnosis™

59 Traditional Goal Getting Strategies

Affirmations

An affirmation is a positive statement that you repeat to yourself in an effort to persuade some part of you that it is true. Typical affirmations would be statements like “I love and accept myself”, “I am a successful…” and the classic “every day in every way I am getting better and better”.

Affirmations were the brainchild of a French pharmacist and psychotherapist called Emile Coué. Dr Coué was influenced by some of the early pioneers of hypnotic techniques in France²⁵. Coué began to adopt hypnotic process in his work with people and he achieved some remarkable success. He later became internationally famous for preaching a form of self hypnosis, or autosuggestion. In this system he encouraged people to train their minds and use them more effectively to overcome illnesses, neuroses and other conditions.

It was Coué who first came up with the self suggestion “every day in every way I am getting better and better”. He would train his patients to enter a hypnotic state, build their belief system and have them repeat these suggestions. After the initial training regime²⁶ these patients would respond tremendously well to self

suggestions. Coué was also one of the first people to make a personal development film and cut a “self help” record. His popularity spread across the globe.

This is where things went slightly awry. The public only got half the message.

People started to believe that all they had to do was repeat a positive statement to themselves a few times each day and all would be well. In some cases that was indeed enough. But not in all.

What is missing from affirmations is the suspension of the critical factor. That is key. Even Coué emphasised repeatedly that the autosuggestions must completely fill your mental perceptions. You cannot have a little voice in the background saying

“that’s rubbish… of course its not true…etc”. One way to accomplish this is to go into trance. In trance the critical factor of the mind is suspended. That is why suggestions have a greater impact – they are accepted without being trashed on the way in. So affirmations will work, but you must suspend that disbelief as you use them, or they fall apart!

25 Dr Bernheim and Auguste Liebault founded the Nancy School of hypnosis and psychotherapy. Freud later briefly studied with them as well.

26 This is a very interesting regime training people to respond to “waking suggestions” like the Postural Sway, Full Body Catalepsy or Locking Hands. For more information on hypnotic techniques such as these see Ledochwoski “The Deep Trance Training Manual, Vol 1”, Crownhouse Publishing, 2003. For more information on the work of Coué, see Coué’s “Self mastery through conscious autosuggestion”, reprinted by Sun Publishing in 1981.

Visualisations

The same mechanism that can make affirmation so powerful also makes

visualisations work. A visualisation is an internal representation of something you want. It has been called guided meditation, guided fantasy, metaphorical processing, constructive daydreaming, imagineering and a host of other things.

In essence, a visualisation is creating an experience inside the mind (in any sensory channel – so something you hear, feel, taste, smell and see inside your mind) that leads you towards a desired outcome. In that sense you could say that affirmations are type of visualisation. Visualisations do the same things, they just have a greater selection of senses to work through and choose from. But visualisations are prone to the same Achilles’ heel as affirmations: belief.

If you can totally immerse yourself in a visualisation, to the point where you have not a scrap of attention left to doubt the content/process, your mind will tend to accept it as true and make it so. It is the element of doubt which destroys the efficacy of this system. This is why there are so many Walter Mitty figures out there. These are people wracked by self doubt busy trying to “programme” a better future, but self sabotaging it the moment they begin. Unfortunate to say the least!

The solution, as with affirmations, is relatively simple: trance. In trance, we have an ever increasing suspension of the critical system – that part of our minds that analyses information and makes snap judgments about whether or not to believe the information. When the critical factor is asleep, information that was routinely being rejected or distorted has a chance to make an impact on our neurology, and change can occur.

This is a good thing because visualisations, when used well, offer us a very powerful tool for personal change and for enhancing our present experience. In later sections of this companion book (e.g. Submodalities or Hypnosis & Trance) you will find many refinements to this simple concept which will allow you to transform the way in which your future unfolds.

For the moment, however, there is an old adage amongst hypnotists which I would like you to remember: where the will and the imagination conflict, the imagination always wins.

If you're going to be thinking, you may as well think big.

Donald Trump W ithout dreams, there is no reality!

Luis B. Couto

The materials in this manual and the accompanying audio seminar are © Street Hypnosis™

61 Language Patterns

Language is at the heart of NLP. It is also at the heart of how people create the realities they live in. The ability to use language with elegance and sophistication in order to influence people in positive ways is one of the hallmarks that sets NLP aside from other disciplines. It is worth getting to know this section very well.

The use of “language patterns” is nothing more than consistently using certain methodologies in your communication style in order to enhance the impact.

Everyone knows that there are people who are influential and charismatic (as therapists, businessmen, politicians etc) and people who are not. The fact is that everyone can be charismatic and influential if they communicate in charismatic and influential ways. That is something you can learn, as surely as you learned your native language. The study of language patterns can be said to be synonymous with studying the actual language of influence.

Language is incredibly important as it has the power to simultaneously trap us and liberate our thinking²⁷:

“The suggestion is that the function of the brain and nervous system and sense organs is in the main eliminative and not productive… The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful… To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funnelled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet. To formulate and express the contents of this reduced awareness, man has invented and endlessly elaborated those symbol-systems and implicit philosophies that we call languages. Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic traditions into which he has been born – the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated record of other people’s experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual thing.”

Language is an incredibly powerful tool. When used well, it can liberate the mind, affect people’s health and create wonderfully rich experiences for people. When used negatively, it can hurt, inhibit and in extreme cases even kill.

27 Aldous Huxley, “The Doors of Perception”, New York, Harper and Row, 1954, pages 22-23.

Presuppositions

A presupposition is a linguistic assumption, usually implied, that something is true.

As an example, if I tell you the “the chair is in the back of the room”, I am presupposing an almost endless set of things:

• There is such a thing as a room.

• There is a larger structure to which the room belongs (rooms don’t exist by themselves!).

• There is a “front” and at least two “sides” of the room.

• The item identified as “chair” is separate from other items and from the rest of the room.

• I am aware of the chair.

• You understand the English language.

The list of presuppositions that can be inferred from the simple statement can be extended from the pedantic to the bizarre. And yet these assumed meanings still guide our thought processes and can lock up our thinking. As these assumptions work outside of conscious analysis, we do not even know that there is an assumption being made which we might want to challenge. This makes presuppositions a very powerful way of communicating influentially – be that in education, therapy or business.

Presuppositions are much weaker when they are stated deliberately than when they are implied. This is because stating the assumption out loud draws conscious attention – and thereby critical analysis – to it. Consider the following statements:

• Just sign on the dotted line and you can take your new car home today!

• I assume that you want to buy this car and that you want to take it home right now, so go ahead and sign on the dotted line and a binding contract will exist between us so that you can do just that.

Both statements say essentially the same thing. However by implying the desire to buy the car, an automatic process is engaged. It is harder for someone to break through the implication, analyse the underlying assumption and the decide whether or not to reject it, then to just go along with things. You should remember that people can and do break such presuppositions on a daily basis. It does happen, particularly when people grow wise to such tactics (many people will be more wary when interacting with a sales person than in other situations). All that

presuppositions do is stack the deck in your favour!

The materials in this manual and the accompanying audio seminar are © Street Hypnosis™

63 Linguistic Presuppositions

Presuppositions can be classified in all manner of ways. The labels of the classification are not important, it is the ideas that they represent that matter. By understanding different categories of presuppositions, you gain more choice both in the way you communicate and in the way you respond to other people’s

communications!

1. Existence

Presuppositions of Existence suggest that something exist and something else does not exist. It creates a duality in reality. If I say “the chair is here” I am implying that a thing called a chair exists and that there are such things in existence that are not-chairs. Similarly saying “John is here” implies that there is a (person) thing called John and that other things are not-John.

So existence can be implied by names, pronouns or descriptions (generic or precise). Likewise both adjectives and adverbs imply the existence. Saying that

“there is a blue dragon” is more persuasive than simply “there is a dragon” as we assume that dragons exist, and the point of analysis is whether or not it is of the blue variety (NB notice that we are implying that other colour dragons also exist!)

These are key presuppositions to master to present elegant and persuasive suggestions!

2. Awareness

Presuppositions of awareness direct attention without requiring a direct request or an order. If I were to ask you “did you notice the pressure of your shoes against your feet?” you have to put your awareness on your feet in order to answer that question. Chances are you were not aware of your feet until I made that statement, just as you were not noticing the sensation on the top of your scalp… but you do now.

So we can direct people’s experiences directly or through negation. “Don’t think of a red cat. Don’t notice that red cat slinking around a red tree…” becomes a very leading statement – you have to think about it because you cannot not think about something without thinking about it first. This can be used to your advantage in a very powerful way when we delve deeper into hypnotic language.

The key words here are things like: notice, aware, sense, realise, think, consider, feel, hear, see, observe… in fact any word that engages one of your five senses will focus the awareness as you wish it.