“I’m in two minds about whether I can do that.”

“I’ve half a mind to do something about it.”

Do you use these phrases? Do you ever go to do something challenging and feel an internal conflict, as if part of you believes you can and part of you is convinced that you can’t? Does it hold you back from doing things you would really, really love to do?

This is completely normal (or at least usual). We all feel it sometimes. Just yesterday I looked at several opportunities that could help me grow my business and thought, “Nah, I can’t do that.”

Here’s why we think that way.

Our inner Clydesdale still thinks we’re little

photo credit: jemsweb
Here’s how you train a Clydesdale. Clydesdales are enormous horses, far stronger than even the strongest man. But if you pick them up a lot when they’re little, you train them to believe that you are stronger than they are, and they keep believing it deep in their placid horse brains – even when it’s no longer true.

We spend most of our first few years of life – up to the early school years – pretty much believing whatever we’re told. We don’t have a lot of ability, at that age, to interpret or analyse the world. We don’t have the knowledge, and we don’t have the skills. So we rely on what other people, especially our parents, tell us is true.

Unfortunately, even the best parents will occasionally (and the worst parents will constantly) tell us that we’re not good enough or we can’t do things. And, in fact, there are a lot of things that a child can’t do.

But, just like the Clydesdales, we retain a vague impression that we can’t do things into adulthood.

Stacking up the evidence

photo credit: tanakawho
One of the key ways that our minds group things is by emotion. If you’re depressed, for example, you’re more likely to remember sad events, while if you’re happy, you’re more likely to remember happy events. Psychologists call this “state-specific memory”.

Because you will always, inevitably, have a stack of experiences around the theme “Can’t do this”, every time you find something you can’t do, you add it to that stack.

Every time you succeed, every time you can do something, that memory goes into a different stack, because it’s connected with a different emotion. The stacks build up in parallel, never communicating, because there is no bridge between them.

And when the situation arises that poses the question “Can I do this?”, both answers are there. You’re in two minds. On the one hand, you have all kinds of experiences saying you can’t do things. On the other hand, you have all kinds of experiences saying that you can. Whichever one shouts louder – whichever stack is higher, or whichever one can find more similarities with the current situation and the ones it has stored – will tend to win out.

Collapsing the stacks

I said a moment ago that these stacks don’t naturally connect, because they don’t share an emotion (even though they come up out of your deep mind into your consciousness at the same time, hooked by the same situation).

What your consciousness can do, though, is deliberately create a connection. Neuro-linguistic programming talks about this as “collapsing the anchors”. I’m going to say “collapsing the stacks”, to keep the same image going. You could imagine that the two stacks are piles of evidence, documents and photographs, stacked up on one side or the other of the case. Your consciousness is the judge. It’s going to bring all the evidence together into one coherent view of reality.

Here’s today’s simple 7-step exercise.

1. Hold out your hands in front of you, palms pointing up.

2. Let all the thoughts and feelings about “I can’t do it” flow from your head down your arm and stack up on one hand. Sit with that until you’ve got the stack, all those photos and documents, all those memories, sitting there on your hand.

3. Now on the other hand stack up all the evidence that you can do things. Think of all your successes, all your growth points, all the times you did things well. Let those photos and documents stack up on that other hand.

4. Balance the evidence. Move your hands in a weighing motion, and feel how the hand with “I can’t” is getting lighter and lighter, and the hand with “I can” is getting heavier and heavier. It’s as if all the old evidence is shrinking and even evaporating, those old documents and photos curling up and shrivelling and fading, so that hand is getting lighter and lighter. And at the same time, the other hand, the “I can” hand, is getting heavier and heavier, as all those documents and photos become clearer and more vivid and carry more and more weight.

5. And now the “I can’t” hand is getting really light as all of that evidence just fades into mist and smoke and ash and is blown away by the wind.

6. Now bring the two hands together. You need both hands because the stack of evidence that you can do things is just getting so heavy, your arm is being pushed and dragged down by the weight of it, and you need to use both hands.

7. And now complete the image by letting all of that evidence flow back up and stack itself up inside your head, neatly stacked, easily accessible any time a situation comes up where you’re deciding whether you can do something and meet a challenge that presents itself to you.

Once again, subscribers to my mailing list get an audio talkthrough of this technique as this month’s free resource. If you’re not on the mailing list, enter your email address here now and (during September 2010) there’ll be a link on the Welcome email for you to download the audio track. I give a different free resource every month, and there’s an immediate bonus for signing up as well, plus you get all my blog posts and occasional special deals on my courses and other material. It’s well worthwhile.

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Not comix (which are quite a different thing, much more intellectual and anarchic). Comics. Superhero comics. (Various webcomics, too, but I’ll talk about those another time.)

This surprises even people who know me well. For one thing, I’m more or less a feminist (if a man can be a feminist, and I know this is fiercely debated), pretty nearly a pacifist, and have a master’s degree in English, whereas superhero comics are full of women in skintight costumes whose breasts are bigger than their heads, contain pretty much wall-to-wall fighting, and are generally considered not too intellectually demanding. (That last point has a lot to do with why I like them, actually.)

As Walt Whitman said, though, “I am large, I contain multitudes.” Somewhere deep down inside me there’s some kind of consistency. (I can only assume.)

Anyway, here are three life lessons I’ve learned from superhero comics.

1. With great power comes great responsibility

photo credit: Eneas
Spider-Man has been through a lot of changes and reinventions since his creation in the 1960s, but at the core he’s always a decent, human guy who is continually crapped upon by life from a great height, but (with a few exceptions, which only serve to humanise him further) does the right thing anyway.

His Uncle Ben’s wisdom – that with great power comes great responsibility – is familiar enough to seem trite. But when you really think about it, especially in the context of Spidey’s life, it’s all about living up to your potential and using what you have in the service of others.

Great power inherently carries the risk of exploiting others. When you’re really powerful, you can do what you like because very few people will try to stop you. Glance at the celebrity news from time to time (then look away quickly) to see how well that generally works out for people.

I’m white, male, middle-aged, middle-class and heterosexual. To have any more hegemony I’d have to be dead. I’m also a hypnotherapist, which is kind of a low-level superpower – not over other people so much (that only works inside the comic books), but over my own body and mind. It’s up to me how I use all that. Great responsibility.

What great power do you have that you can use for others’ benefit?

2. You can’t beat a good team-up

photo credit: Willrad
One of the most popular formats for comics is the “team-up”, where two or more superheroes join together to face a threat that they can’t defeat individually. There are also some great team comics – the Justice League, the Avengers, the Teen Titans, the Fantastic Four.

Team-ups work much better for heroes than they do for villains, and there’s a simple reason. Villains are always out for what they can get, while heroes have a higher purpose, a dedication to the welfare of others.

I can’t always triumph over my challenges alone, either. Sometimes I need to team up. That’s one reason I’ve been doing a lot of guest-posting lately. I also get coaching from several other people, because there are things they see (and know) that I don’t.

Who could you team up with?

Everyone has a weakness

photo credit: Randy Son Of Robert
I thought a lot about this last one. Should I use “No truly important character ever dies permanently?” “You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry?” “You’re a person if you act like a person, regardless of your appearance?” All good lessons. But I went for “Everyone has a weakness” because it’s so fundamental to comics that it’s just silently assumed.

No matter whether the character is an Olympian god, the Last Son of Krypton or an immortal being who eats planets, there’s always some way to defeat them. There’s always a balance, always a solution, always a way to carry the day. (And it’s not just because someone who just automatically won all the time would be unbelievably boring. Life’s really like that.)

And the inevitable consequence is this: Great power or not, there’s some way in which you’re vulnerable, and only by connecting up with your team are you going to be able to overcome that and then find the inevitable weakness of your opponent. (You see what I did there?)

One of my weaknesses is that I enjoy thinking about things more than doing them.

What vulnerability do you have?

If you’d like to team up with me for any purpose, including to work on your weakness or develop your great power and its responsible use, contact me and let me know. I’d love to partner with you.

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Many years ago, there was a young Chinese boy who was fortunate enough to be given an apprenticeship to a famous jade master.

On his first morning, as he hurried to the old man’s house, the boy looked forward eagerly to his day. “Today,” he said to himself, “the master will begin to teach me about jade.”

But when he got there, the master handed him a pebble of jade to hold and began to talk about everything under the sun – except jade.

The boy was disappointed, but as he walked home he consoled himself. “The master was just getting to know me today,” he thought. “Surely tomorrow he will begin to teach me about jade.”

But the next day came, and it was just the same as the first. The old man gave the boy a pebble of jade to hold, and began to talk about all of the Ten Thousand Things – except jade.

Day after day this happened. The boy began to despair. “Did I fail some test?” he thought. “Does the master not want me as his apprentice? Will he ever begin to teach me about jade?”

He was a well-brought-up Chinese boy and had been taught not to question his elders, but one day, as he trudged to the master’s house, he had had enough. “Today,” he thought, “I will ask the master when he will begin to teach me about jade.”

But when he arrived at the house, before he could say anything, the master, as his custom was, put a pebble into the boy’s hand. And without thinking, the apprentice cried out, “Master, that’s not jade!”

photo credit: avlxyz

So what did I learn last week? (You may be wondering.)

Well, when I told that story to myself, I always thought I was the master. You see, people come to me for help with very mundane, ordinary things. They eat too much, or they smoke, or bite their nails. They’re not confident, or they’re stressed and worried. And I help them with those things, but at the same time I give them simple tools and resources and techniques that, if they stick with them and use them as I suggest, will help to turn them into stronger, more integrated and happier people over the long-term. For example, I recently posted a video interview with one of my clients who came to me to give up smoking and ended up becoming kinder to herself, a better mother to her boys, and someone who could start to live out her creative dreams with confidence and enthusiasm.

I’m like the master who had begun to teach about jade without the apprentice even realising it.

Or so I thought.

Last week, I realised I’m the apprentice.

You see, I’ve been struggling to figure out how to present what I do so that people will want to buy it from me (so that, in turn, I can do it all the time). I was expecting that the marketing courses I’ve taken would tell me, like the jade master, all about how to do this. I was expecting knowledge at the level of words.

But through a half-hour talk with Catherine Caine, whose ability to ask just the right questions borders on the uncanny, I realised what I’d been feeling all along, what the pebbles were that I’d been given to hold. What I really want to do is help people – ordinary people, people with kids and mortgages and jobs who do the dishes and mow the lawn – to find depth and meaning and resourcefulness in their ordinary lives, to live skillfully, to make the world a noticeably better place for them and those around them to live in. That’s the work I love. That’s jade. It starts with addressing the obvious symptoms: smoking, overeating, various kinds of “bad habits” and self-harming behaviours. But the point is not to stop doing those things, but to become the kind of person who doesn’t need to do those things any more.

So what I’m going to start doing is talking about what I do in those terms. I’m not sure about the exact language yet, and what I’ll end up calling what I do, but I’m going to give up pretending that I’m here to offer the quick fix and then slipping the things that people are really missing, the meaning and the self-belief and the integration of all the parts of themselves, in through the side door.

That’s not jade!

Related posts:

1. How to Find Your Way in Less than 20 Years

Read it? Good.

All right. This is a true story, and I often tell it to my clients. You’ll see why.

photo credit: futureatlas.com

Towards the end of World War II, a Japanese soldier got separated from his unit on one of the Pacific islands – one large enough to have a jungle that he could disappear into. And that’s exactly what he did – for several decades.

Eating what he could find, sleeping in improvised shelter, his uniform becoming rags, his rifle rusting, he kept on faithfully fulfilling his last orders. He was still fighting the war.

Meanwhile, though, back in Japan, there was a new government with a new agenda. Instead of approaching other nations as enemies, this Japanese government approached them as allies and trading partners. It was a new era for Japan, an era of increasing prosperity – and they wanted all their citizens to participate, not only in creating but in enjoying the new way.

But off on his island, here was this man, alone, still following the old orders – because nobody could reach him to tell him that the war was over.

If you’re experiencing a conflict within yourself, what’s likely to be happening is that there’s a part of yourself that’s still fighting an old war, still trying to protect you – faithfully – from a threat that doesn’t really exist in your current situation. What you think of as “yourself” is like the post-war Japanese government, headed in a new direction, connecting to the world in a new way, but there’s another part hidden away somewhere that doesn’t realise that the war is over.

And by bringing that part of yourself into dialogue, finding out what its critical agenda is that it’s pursuing so faithfully, and helping it to discover how to pursue that agenda without sabotaging the agenda of other important parts, you can reincorporate that faithful passion into yourself and align it with your highest goals. At the moment, that part is using its energy to struggle against another part of yourself, which is using its energy to resist – and all that energy is going to waste. Imagine what would happen if they were pulling together towards your main goal.

photo credit: DVIDSHUB

This is the kind of work I can help you with: re-integrating those parts of yourself that passionately want to protect you, but have an outdated way of showing it. At the moment I have a few spaces open for people to work with me (and yes, we can do it even if you’re elsewhere in the world). Email me for details: mikerm at hypno.co.nz.

What might that part of you be protecting you from?

Related posts:

1. Multiple selves and personal integration: the Parts Conference

I sell through E-junkie, and offer the usual 50% commission, on my online courses only (not consulting).

I pay out commissions by PayPal mass payment, around the middle of each month.

Join my affiliate program here.

Ask me about review copies of the products – I don’t give these out to everyone, for obvious reasons, but if you have a demonstrated track record of doing fair reviews (or I know you), I may comp you a review copy. (I expect that you’ll disclose that the copy was provided for purposes of review.)

Right now I’m looking for partners who will review my Inner Success product (about an hour of audio) and tell me exactly what I could add that would make it a no-brainer for their audience to buy. If you’re interested, contact me.

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Sarah is one of my clients, and she very kindly and completely spontaneously offered to let me interview her about her personal growth journey from disintegration to integration, and how working with me has contributed to that journey. She originally came to me to stop smoking, but (as you’ll hear) it turned into much more than that.

I’ve split the interview into 4 short videos, totalling about 20 minutes. If you want just the audio, you can download it here.

In part 1, you’ll hear:

• why a 38-year-old single mother-of-two and aspiring actress thinks it worthwhile to spend her scarce time and money working on personal development,
• how smoking was a way for her to avoid herself and the circumstances of her life,
• how she didn’t want suffering and stuckness and hating herself to be her only story, and
• why she came to me to find ways to cope, become stronger and find out who she really is.

In part 2, you’ll hear:

• what you should do if you start smoking (or whatever) again after you’ve stopped,
• how important it is to do it for yourself and nobody else,
• how to get beyond powerlessness and being stuck to be at home in yourself,
• how “negative integration” can stand in the way of being your whole powerful self,
• about motherhood, grace, ease and perfectionism, and
• what happens once you take away the smokescreen.

In part 3, you’ll hear:

• how facing things and speaking to yourself more kindly can flow over into better mothering,
• how deep love can be hidden under feelings of incompetence and overwhelm,
• how getting out of your own way improves your relationships,
• how much difference 6 weeks can make,
• how powerful it can be to work with a single metaphor over an extended period, and
• about finding the “resonant core of your deep self” and persisting in following your heart.

In part 4, you’ll hear:

• what to do if you feel stuck,
• how to get your self back and find joy, and
• what I do and don’t do to help you change.

If you are in a similar place to where Sarah was at the start of our work together, contact me and let’s talk about how you can follow her great example. (And yes, I can work with you remotely over Skype.)

Related posts:

1. Feeling normal again
2. Memory erasure to stop drug addiction relapse?
3. Close Up feature on hypnotherapy for smoking cessation

photo credit: Jesse757

Not about controlling other people. (In fact, I kind of have a Thing about not controlling other people, because I hate other people trying to control me.) And not even so much about being in control of what’s happening around me, because I figured out early on that that wasn’t realistic.

My Thing is about being in control of myself.

This is why I’ve never got really drunk, for example, and in fact why I hardly ever drink at all.

I realise I’m unusual in this – at least, in how much I’m like this. But what it does is it gives me a lot of empathy for people who feel out of control, and a powerful motivation to learn techniques for getting back in control.

Which is why I do what I do. I work with people, typically stressed, busy people, who feel that their thoughts, emotions and behaviours aren’t completely under their control and who are increasingly unhappy about that. And I help them to regain that sense of control, so that they can decide on the direction of their lives and turn their attention to living their best life without being held back.

In my case, the out-of-controlness in my life has mainly been my emotions. (For other people it’s more thoughts or behaviour, but it’s all linked together somewhere down in there.) In particular, I went through an experience of several years in which I felt very out of control of my emotions.

I did my master’s degree in one year, which the university I attended let you do in that particular field, and I was involved in a lot of other things that year as well. In retrospect, I was doing too much – and it wore me down and made me emotionally vulnerable.

I fell in love, and it wasn’t reciprocated, but I had so much fear around saying anything that I didn’t find that out for a long time, and then I kept hoping, and had so much fear around saying anything that I didn’t find out again for a long time that the answer was still no, and in the meantime I’d started training for something that I wasn’t suited for or any good at, and living with too many other people, and members of my close family, in another country, were ill, and I was extremely short of money and then I got ill (from the stress), and there were times I wanted to hurl plates at my housemates I was so angry, and there were times I wanted to kill myself I was so depressed, and I started to have panic attacks whenever I was in a crowd, and the upshot was that I couldn’t work full-time for several years and carried the hurt and bitterness for many more years.

So I learned a lot about stress.

And I learned a lot, over the years that followed, about personal development and about how people work, because I wanted to understand myself and I wanted to make sure that I didn’t go down that path again.

And finally I discovered hypnotherapy. And once I figured out that it wasn’t about someone else controlling you, but about you having more control over yourself, I realised that this was what I’d been looking for.

Around the same time I started learning to meditate, which is another path to self-control. In the form I practice it, it’s about letting go of superficial thoughts (which include emotions) and allowing your true self to arise.

One day it was my turn to lead our little meditation group, and nobody else happened to turn up. So I was sitting by myself in an empty building, and fear came to visit, because I also have a Thing about being alone which is deeper and more buried than the control thing.

So I let fear go, and fear came, and I let fear go, and after about 20 minutes the timer went off and that was OK. Nothing terrible had happened because fear had come.

And the following weekend I went to a hypnotherapy conference and was more confident and gregarious than I’d ever been in my life.

photo credit: Jeremy Burgin

So my point, and I do have one, is this: If you’re feeling out of control I can completely relate to that. I mean, if I tell you I can control my skin temperature and stop my shaving cuts from bleeding and alter my heartbeat (all of which is true), it sounds like I have some kind of superpower and that I’m totally on top of things. But the reason I can do that stuff (which is a lot easier than it sounds, and also a lot less useful) is that I wanted to learn how to be in control of more important things, like fear and anger and sadness. And stress.

But enough about me. What’s your stress story? I realise you might not want to tell it publicly, so I’ve put a form below that posts, anonymously, to a place that only I will see. I look at all the responses, and I keep them in mind in everything I do, because I want to help other people feel in control of their stress too.

Related posts:

1. How to Find Your Way in Less than 20 Years
2. Alcohol in moderation through hypnotherapy
3. Psychosomatic illness: Your mind extends throughout your body

This is the free course that helps you to get your stress under control with some effective quick techniques. It also has some background material so that you can start to:

• understand stress better,
• figure out why you keep stressing, and
• get some insights into how you might stop.

If you’re struggling with stress one way or another, and would like to get on top of it, you can find out more (and sign up) in either of two ways:

• If you want a quick introduction and you like video, go to stresshowto.com.
• If you’d prefer to read a longer, fuller explanation, go to emotionalcircuitbreaker.com.

(Both of those addresses point back to Hypno NZ, they’re just easy-to-remember ways to get to the signup pages.)

And if you’re not stressed yourself, but know someone who does, point them to one of those links!

I’ll close off with one of the videos I made last week to answer some frequently asked questions. This one is “What is stress?”.

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I offer specific coaching and personal development services if you’re looking for:

• Confidence (in social, interpersonal or business situations)
• Focus, motivation, goal setting and achievement
• Habit change (mental, emotional and behavioural), including smoking and overeating
• Preparation for performance (sports, arts, public speaking etc.)
• Stress management
• Overcoming specific fears and phobias

(If you think of something else you’d like to work on and wonder if I could help, contact me and we’ll talk.)

If you’re wondering what I’m like to work with, here’s a client testimonial.

Here’s what we’ll typically do in my “Get Unstuck Before You Come Unglued” programme, spread over 3 one-hour sessions:

Session 1

• Connect and get on the same wavelength
• Talk about what you’d like to change in your thoughts, feelings and behaviours
• Discuss the background to the issue
• Clarify the outcome you want
• Start you moving in the direction of your outcome

Session 2

• Discuss how things have been going since Session 1
• Review the outcome and see if you want to revise it
• Discuss in more depth what might be preventing the outcome from happening
• Create new strategies to deal with the barriers

Session 3

• Discuss progress and revise outcome
• Assess how the new strategies have been working
• Reinforce those that have worked and revise or replace any others
• Establish resources for continuing progress

We do this through a combination of techniques, some of them coaching or counselling techniques, others therapeutic and hypnotic techniques, some for analysis, others for solutions.

Obviously, we’ll vary the outline according to what’s going on for you, what your issue is and what techniques you find most helpful

Each package of three sessions costs $300 (New Zealand dollars, which is less than 300 of most other currencies).

Here’s how to book a package of three sessions, via Skype or in person (in Titirangi, Auckland, New Zealand).

1. Select a time for the first session from the calendar below, and fill in the little form you get taken to next. I’ll get an email automatically.
2. For Skype sessions, you must prepay, and for face-to-face sessions you can prepay if you don’t want to bring cash or a cheque to the session. Click the button and pay by credit card or PayPal.


3. I will send you a personal email to confirm. Especially if you are making your booking close to the time of the appointment, don’t assume the session is confirmed until you hear from me.

If you have any problems with the online booking system, contact me.

For more about me and what I do, click here.

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