Looking to start a fulfilling career in hypnotherapy? Look no further than The Quest Institute, where we are now enrolling for annual Cognitive Hypnotherapy courses in London, July 2024.

Hypnotherapy has become increasingly popular as a form of therapy, offering individuals a unique and effective way to enhance their lives. And with London being the hub of innovation and modern approaches, it’s no surprise that the demand for hypnotherapy courses in the city is on the rise.

Delivered at Regent’s University London, we offer cutting-edge courses that equip students with the skills, knowledge and qualifications needed to excel in the field of Hypnotherapy and NLP.

So what makes this course stand out? Firstly, it’s accredited by the National Council for Hypnotherapy (NCH), the UK’s largest not-for-profit hypnotherapy professional association. This accreditation ensures that the course meets the highest standards of quality and professionalism, giving students the confidence and recognition they need to excel in their careers.

Why We’re The Best Choice for Hypnotherapy Courses in London

The course curriculum has been carefully crafted by the founder of Cognitive Hypnotherapy, Trevor Silvester. Students receive a well-rounded education that covers all aspects of the training and can achieve a full level 4 qualification. From theory and practical application to ethical considerations and client management, students will gain a comprehensive understanding of the practice.

In addition, the course includes a robust practical component, where students will have the opportunity to apply their skills in real-life settings. This takes place under the supervision of experienced hypnotherapists. This hands-on experience is invaluable, as it allows students to develop their skills and gain confidence in their abilities.

But what sets this course apart? Cognitive Hypnotherapy is very different from traditional hypnotherapy. It provides a framework which helps identify the unique pattern of each person’s issue – including the trance state that drives it. This helps the therapist to design a bespoke treatment using a wide range of techniques. Including from NLP, Gestalt and Ericksonian Hypnosis.

Plus, we are the only approach to have published evidence of the effectiveness of our approach, when compared to other talking therapies used within the NHS. Students will learn how to use this approach to help clients overcome a wide range of issues. Such as anxiety, stress, phobias, and much, much more.

Train in Quest Cognitive Hypnotherapy, in London or Online

Our courses are held at Regent’s University London’s stunning Inner Circle campus, located in the heart of Regent’s Park. Students can also learn live online from anywhere in the world. With state-of-the-art facilities and a supportive learning environment, students will have everything they need to thrive academically and create an exciting and rewarding career.

Upon completion of the course, students will have the necessary knowledge and practical skills to become certified hypnotherapists. You will join the ranks of successful cognitive hypnotherapists in London and worldwide.

Passionate about helping others and looking for a fulfilling and dynamic career? Why not arrange an interview to enrol onto our level 4 Diploma Cognitive Hypnotherapy course starting in July 2024. Get in touch to find out more!

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I was a year into being single after a painful divorce. Is there any other kind? To add to the weirdness of singledom after ten years of marriage, at the same time I threw my career up into the air by transferring from Thames Valley Police to the Met. I went from everything and everyone being familiar, to me feeling that I understood virtually nothing in my life. It had been a long, mainly lonely, scary, and pretty empty year.

In ways I didn’t really appreciate at the time, my boys had been my anchor. I had them every day I had off and they gave me a focus I otherwise lacked – even if sometimes that was only to spend hours when I was alone keeping ahead of them on the Nintendo. I’ve found sometimes focusing on anything you can manage, no matter how trivial, is better than focusing on everything you can’t. And at that time, life was what I felt I couldn’t manage. In the midst of feeling like I was stuck and drifting at the same time, I decided I needed a holiday, and that they deserved one, so I took out a loan, chose a destination, and we were off.

It was strange picking them up. It almost felt like a hire car scenario, where they were being given to me in perfect condition and their bodywork would be checked when I returned them, so when Stu’s eczema flared badly on his feet midway through the holiday it necessitated carrying him around several Farmacias to find some cream for his feet and something for my panic. That aside, we had a brilliant time. Pizza every day. The same pizza. From the same place. We were completely sure – and remain of the same opinion – that it was the best pizza we’d ever had. We spent long days on the beach talking boy, playing football, building stuff. I remember waking one morning to find Mark drinking out of the fountain in the bathroom. It was a bidet. Foreign seemed a lot more foreign back then.
And in-between I had time to think, and hope, and dream. They revived me, although, again, I didn’t properly appreciate it at the time.

And while Stu swears I did him irreparable psychological damage by letting him drift out to sea on a Lilo, (does 8 feet count as ‘out to sea’?) at the end of the week I dropped them off unharmed, bodywork mainly intact. I cried in the car the whole way home.

2014. Menorca. I press play on my iPhone, and Madonna plays again. It’s a song that’s either lasted the test of time or nostalgia is what it used to be. I share a smile with my boys, and we raise a glass. We’re in a nice café overlooking a stunning bay. I look at their plates. Pizza. Pretty sure they still had it every day. Stu tries his beautiful one year old daughter Sasha with a crust, Mark pretends to be shot by his amazing two and half year old son Heath. My heart couldn’t be more full.

We have a week together. The boys, their wives, Bex – who’s done just about everything to make the whole thing possible – our grandkids, and me. As you can probably guess, it was a very special time for me – and I think for them too, the Majorca holiday was as big a deal in their childhood as a three year loan repayment could have hoped for. We have great memories of us there, and it’s a wonderful tradition to build on with our new generation. I can’t wait for next year.

So why am I telling you this? Well, it depends who you are, because what I want to say, to anyone who needs to hear it is…keep going. You might feel lost right now, maybe even hopeless. You may feel that you’ve made choices you can never recover from. I think you’ll find you’re wrong if you just keep seeking what you’re looking for, even if you don’t know what that is. Keep looking. As I sat watching them build sandcastles in Majorca I didn’t know I was just a few months away from becoming an instructor at Hendon training school, where I would discover the calling that would give me a purpose to my life that changed it utterly. While I was eight years from finding the love of that life, it needed me to keep going to find her. As Steve Jobs said, the dots only join up when you look back. I agree; ahead is supposed to look chaotic, but the dots are out there, and you’re the pen. Keep going.

I want to say to whoever needs to hear it, don’t let yourself be limited by anyone, including those you love. Especially those you love. There would be many occasions when I felt trapped or held back by a feeling of responsibility to my boys. But I wasn’t, I was trapped and held back by my lack of belief in myself, and just blamed them for it. And I proved that when I threw my life in the air again by leaving the police and starting a new career as a hypnotherapist while the boys were still at school. So I know just how different life feels when you make yourself responsible for everything you do or don’t do. And I know how much more free I was to love my kids when I stopped making them a burden.

And I want to tell you that things will work out if you keep going, just not how you might have expected or dreamed. I had no idea that one day I’d be sat watching my sons being fantastic fathers, or feel my heart melt at Sasha’s smile of recognition or Heath’s giggle when I tackle him in beach rugby.

As the saying goes, everything turns out ok in the end. And if it’s not ok, it’s not the end. My only caveat to that being, take action, keep going, keep looking, keep learning, and make your life your responsibility. And eat pizza on the beach with anyone you love, as often as you can.

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Until we got a letter.

From Companies House.

It told us that we had been reported for use of it within our company name, and unless we could put together a case within 28 days as to why we qualified for authorisation to use the word, we faced prosecution.

The difference between Bex and I in our response to this news – after we’d stopped swearing – was a microcosm of our relationship, both as business partners and husband and wife.

Me: “Oh well…Hey what shall we call ourselves instead?” I started disappearing into my head to consider the exciting possibilities of rebranding our whole business.
I was brought back  by Bex clapping her hands to get my attention.”Whoa there cowboy, not so fast…” Me: “But why? It could be fun.” Bex: “Because I know who’ll have to do most of the work while you have the fun. We should at least try to make a case. ”

We played a brief hand of Face Poker. I led with a pout. Bex saw my pout and raised me an eyebrow. I folded.

We’d make a case.

It led to a torrid summer. We put together an application, and were turned down. We responded to their feedback, and tried again. It was denied a second time. Bex spent many hours communicating with the accrediting bodies who validate the standard of our work – the NCH, The CNHC and the NCFE – and especially the helpful staff at Companies House. More hours were spent sitting in our office trying to decipher some of the correspondence we received, and planning our next steps. I helped with some words, and, in my head, planned what we would do if we were up against a brick wall – as a small business this was tying up a lot of time, and at some point we’d have to move on or lose momentum. We decided to try one more appeal.

Looking at it, we thought it looked convincing – and, actually, I felt very proud of just how far we’d come in the 13 years since we launched Quest. We like to think that Quest is leading the way  in establishing the use of outcome measures as standard practice for hypnotherapists in the private sector. Working  together with Bill Andrews and the Pragmatic Research Network we now have an ever-increasing number of our qualified therapists entering client feedback on our tailor-made research database. We’ve been finding out first hand that conducting this type of research is fraught with problems, especially when trying to do it outside of the resources of the NHS and medical establishment, but we’ve persevered.  Bex and our Research Manager, Julie Gibbs, were very proud to present the provisional findings from our 6 month pilot study as a poster presentation at the College of Medicine in June this year.

We are now working on getting our results written up and published. Our provisional results indicate a success rate in reducing symptoms of both anxiety and depression which compare very favourably with other talking therapies such as CBT. We’re not published yet, and of course wouldn’t want to be seen to be making any wild or unsubstantiated claims, but it’s all very exciting. So we crossed our fingers, and sent our application to Companies House.
  

A while later, we were walking in Virginia Water with our grandson, Heath, when we got a call from our office manager and right hand woman, Jan. As an aside, Jan is one of the main reasons why this was worth fighting for. A Suffolk girl, she answers our phone with, “Hello, Quest Instatoot?” which is guaranteed to make us smile. It would be a loss to the world if we had to change our name, just for that. It’s actually worth ringing her number just to hear it. Go on, she won’t mind.

Anyway, it was a Saturday, so a call from her was unusual. As it turned out, it was for the best of reasons. She wanted to tell us that we’d had a letter from Companies House…and we’d been approved!

Heath happily joined in with the hugs and high-fives, and the celebration Bakewell tart. Later, without him, we popped a cork. We’re an Institute. That feels pretty cool, which is weird because, in our minds, we always have been. But now we’re an Institute because we’ve shown to the satisfaction of Companies House that we’d fulfilled their criteria. They’d previously informed us that, ‘institutes are organisations that typically undertake research at the highest level or are professional bodies of the highest standing.’ We hope that’s how they’ve seen us, because a lot of work has gone into getting us to this point in our evolution, not just from Bex, me and Jan, but the scores of Quest Cognitive Hypnotherapists  who help so many– and especially the ones who are part of our Research Team, led by Julie. We really are grateful to them.

I’d also like to thank the folks at the National Council for Hypnotherapy, who were very helpful and supportive, and those at the Surrey Institute of Clinical Hypnotherapy, who were placed in the same boat, and generously collaborated with us. Happily they were also successful.

And most of all I’d like to thank whoever reported us. We’d never have become The Quest Institute, for real, without their help.

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It was about his struggle with the pessimism that has infected his life for many years – but not his whole life, he remembers himself being a very happy and carefree little boy. As with many of the clients we Cognitive Hypnotherapists deal with, this expectation of things turning out negatively had led to problems with anxiety, chronic insomnia, and a general lessening of his quality of life. Fortunately it hadn’t manifested as depression, which it often does. Interestingly, early on in the programme we saw that his pessimism was visible on a brain scan. Essentially it, like optimism, is a habit of mind. His question was, was he stuck with this habitual way of seeing the world as part of his nature, or was there anything he could do to help himself become more optimistic?

One of the many things that fascinated me was his meeting with a set of identical twins, one of whom had developed clinical depression. Scientists had analysed the DNA of both sisters and found that the depressed sister’s was different to her twin, which clearly it shouldn’t be. The conclusion they’d reached was that the depression had caused the change. It wasn’t made clear how they knew that the non-depressed twin’s DNA hadn’t changed which was why she hadn’t developed depression, but in either case it demonstrates something very exciting: that our DNA is not our destiny. Our DNA can be changed by outside influences. It suggests that a person born without a genetic disposition for depression can develop it in response to life events, and that that depression is a reflection of a change in their genes. In theory it should also mean that someone born with the genetic disposition for depression could have life experiences (like successful therapy) which would change the DNA that ‘causes’ it so they don’t experience it again. For how many other conditions could this be true?

A scientist called Bruce Lipton must be doing his ‘I told you so’ dance right now, because he’s been claiming this for years. He’s long pointed out that our DNA sits and does nothing until it receives a signal from its environment. What is becoming clear is that what is meant by environmental signals isn’t just pre-ordained chemical activity at a cellular level,  but that also what happens around us every day, and how we respond to it, causes those signals to be sent. And why wouldn’t they? If our personality evolves in response to what happens to us throughout our lives, those changes would need to be ‘written’ somewhere for them to keep being expressed from day to day, otherwise who you were each morning would be quite random. It seems our DNA is a personality memory bank as well as its other functions, and our mind is involved in changing it.

From a therapy point of view, this is obviously fascinating and very exciting. People are changed by life, at the most fundamental level, so if they can change for the negative the possibility has to exist that they can also change for the positive. Are there ways to deliberately achieve this? Michael tried two methods, Cognitive Bias Modification (CBM) and Mindfulness.

With CBM he used a computer programme that showed him a series of 15 random faces on a screen, only one of which was happy, and his task was to select it. As he did so the screen was refreshed with another 15 faces and he had to find the smiley one, and this continued for 10 minutes. Research has shown that pessimists take longer to spot the happy face than optimists. The theory was that by repeating this exercise every night, it would retrain his unconscious to pick up positive information in his environment in preference to the automatic search for the negative. This lies at the heart of the difference between pessimists and optimists. Winston Churchill famously said, “A pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity, an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.” The unconscious of a pessimist is sensitised to search for what could be wrong, the optimist for what could be right. In Cognitive Hypnotherapy this premise is central to our work. I have a saying, “We feed what we focus on”. I mean that the more you focus on the negatives in your life, the more you feed them, the stronger and more prevalent they become. The good news is, the same is true if you focus on the positives.

Back in the sixties a gifted mathematician called George Polya put his attention on how people reason. He was decades ahead of his time because he realised that while we can be logical, most of the decisions we make are based on unconscious, largely emotion-driven, processes. Modern science has now validated this. He developed a model called patterns of plausible inference, a number of rules-of-thumb the unconscious uses to make decisions and predictions. One of the most powerful of these is, ‘The more something happens, the more it will’. Anyone who follows the England football team will understand this only too well when it comes to penalty shoot-outs. This particular Polya pattern underpins the notion that ‘we get the future we expect’.

With our clients, me and my fellow Cog Hypers don’t accomplish the retuning of their negative expectation by getting them to use a computer programme, but by them listening to a ten minute recording we make for them to listen to each night. It contains suggestions based on these patterns of inference, within a framework of hypnotic language I developed, called Wordweaving, to nudge their unconscious from its usual sensitivity and preference for noticing the daily evidence of their problem, to noticing instead the evidence that would mean they’re getting better. The more they notice their positives, the more they will.

The second thing Michael used was mindfulness, which is a fascinating area of study, based on Buddhist principles and utilising meditation. He was taught it by an ex-monk, and was shown listening to a recording that guided him into being more mindful of the present by focusing on his body. Anxiety is a fear of something that hasn’t happened yet, but might. Sometimes it manifests as a particular dread of something, more often it generalises into a foreboding that anything bad could happen, at any moment.  Pessimists, similarly, are tuned to an expectation that whatever happens today is likely to include something bad. A great deal of your brain’s capacity is involved with prediction. We seem to be the only creature on the planet who can look ahead and anticipate the future. It’s been a tremendously important part of our success as a species, but it comes with drawbacks, one of which is that we can spend far too much time worrying about things that might happen, but probably won’t.  Pessimists, people who suffer from anxiety, insomnia, ‘worriers’ in general, and some people with depression, spend so much time fretting about ‘what if’ that their health suffers. This is largely because worry causes adrenalin to flow through us, which is exhausting long-term, and a tremendous drain on our immune system. That drain alone can cause depression.  As a consequence of their catastrophising these people can become frozen, unable to make a decision, scared of moving forward, and increasingly unhappy.

Listening to the meditation track, it’s easy to see the similarity with what is marketed as self-hypnosis. I treat both meditation and self-hypnosis as two versions of the same phenomenon; trance. With meditation the purpose of the trance is usually the abandonment of an attachment to things, including your thoughts, so that you get better at simply being in the moment. With self-hypnosis, it’s usually the guiding of unconscious attention within the trance state for a particular purpose, like listening to something to increase your confidence, lose weight etc. With the mindfulness approach, it seems to have a foot in both camps, in that it’s the development of the skill of being present, which lessens your anxiety and catastrophising and thereby increases your optimism and sense of wellbeing.  It’s good to see the East and West’s utilisation of the same mental capability harmonising, rather than being seen as two separate things.

In Cognitive Hypnotherapy, I think we go one step further. Our Wordweaving downloads guide your unconscious towards a more mindful habit, and also trains the unconscious to increasingly notice the good things in your world in order to amplify them.  Through utilising trance in this way, change doesn’t become a tedious conscious pursuit, but an unconscious change of habit.  We’re simply using a human capability that Buddhists have used for thousands of years to increase their wellbeing, for your more specific needs. The idea is that through trance we have a route to positively influence your unconscious, and that by being influenced it causes your way of seeing the world to change, which changes the way you feel and behave within it.  And now it seems that positive cascade might go even deeper – all the way toy our DNA. You have to wonder how far this rabbit hole goes, don’t you?

The programme’s end saw Michael and his wife reporting an improvement in his level of optimism, and an improvement in his sleep, which is great because I’d like him to be happier, and keep making great programmes.

Optimism – and happiness – is largely based on the choice your unconscious is making about what you notice most. We have the tools to guide it to notice most what would make you feel best. If you’re interested in the possibilities of my Wordweaving downloads, you can find many here, including one designed specifically to boost optimism. Alternatively, you can find a Quest-trained Cognitive Hypnotherapist near you by clicking here.

Here’s to happier times through developing happier habits of mind:)

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Yoghurt pots are evil. I had held mine at arms length and opened it away from me, and still its contents found a home on my first choice tie. Actually, only choice tie, because I discovered when I turned the tv on in our hotel room that Charlie Stayt, one of my interviewers that morning on BBC Breakfast, was wearing one pretty much identical with my spare. So dabbing with a damp napkin it was. Hurrah for HD television.

I’ve never done television before, so both Bex and I were just up for enjoying the whole experience, which was very easy. The new BBC facility in Media City in Salford is just amazing, the staff gently and kindly efficient as they brought us in wide eyed and giggly, let us enjoy the legendary Green room – which actually isn’t green – took me through makeup (it seemed to take a lot of anti-glare gel on my forehead to satisfy the makeup girl) before the floor manager ushered me into the studio. Twenty minutes tops from street to red sofa. One minute I’m watching Susanna Reid and Charlie on the hospitality tv, the next I’m being introduced

to them. Anyone would find that a bit odd, it’s like inflating something flat into 3d. “This is Noah Stewart” said the floor manager…Hello, that’s even more odd…Susanna looked up and smiled, “No it’s not.” I’m glad she noticed, at that stage I was prepared to be anybody. The floor manager was hugely apologetic. “Don’t worry, I get mistaken for him all the time” I said, trying to help. Another smile from Susanna, “Do you really?” “Yes, it’s a curse, actually, because I can’t even sing” “That’s a shame,” she said, “he was discovered as an understudy”. It was a good start.

They both relaxed me so much I wasn’t even sure we’d started. All the cameras are remote controlled so I think we were the only three people actually present in the studio, and they didn’t even really look like cameras ( I was looking for Grandstand models circa 1970, I think), which made the whole atmosphere very calm. My spot was actually reduced because of the breaking story of the morning – which presented its own challenge; “Oscar Pretorious has been arrested for shooting his girlfriend. Now in the studio we have Trevor Silvester to talk about how to get on better in relationships”, but I loved the whole experience, although it was a lot of a blur during the actual chat, and it was great exposure for Lovebirds. I hope I get the chance to do it more.

An unexpected highlight was meeting a celebrity. My first sight of him was him being carried shoulder-high across the plaza of media city. I was a bit miffed actually, as I had to walk. Didn’t they know who I was?

Bob the cat appeared in the green room shortly afterwards with his ‘owner’ James Bowen, who let him skip down from his shoulder and did his manful best to dissuade him from a pan au chocolate. These celebrities. For those of you who don’t know, James was homeless, selling the big issue and busking as part of his fight to leave his addiction to heroin and methodone behind, when he met an injured Bob. They nursed each other back to health and have become inseparable. James openly contends that Bob was a bigger feature of his recovery than any treatment programme he’d ever been on. The love between them is both obvious and inhaleable, and you can’t be in their presence without being refreshed by it. Maybe that helped my unexpected calmness in front of camera, or maybe it was the reminder of what is really important in the world – people, nature, and what can emerge from the connection between them. Read his book, you’ll love it – and I don’t even like cats.

And I want to thank the unbelievable love and support from my friends both before and after the interview, they really enhanced the whole thing by the way they joined the excitement. Another unusual day. I wonder what will be the next?

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Until this happened: A week after Bex and I were driving somewhere listening to the Steve Wright show on the eve of my new book being published, and I happened to say to her, “Wouldn’t it be great if I ended up on his show?” I was told by Leni, my lovely publicist at Hodder, that I was going to be. Now I can write that off to coincidence and happen-stance, but I’ve also said to Bex, on a number of occasions, how I’d love to be on a show with Stephen Fry, just because I like him so much.

Well, imagine my surprise when that happened too. Kind of. As you can see, I was on the same show as our national treasure, but only because of the wonders of pre-recording, we never actually met, and he’s probably completely unaware that we shared the billing.

So, just in case Bex has some weird cosmic ordering facility, I’ve resolved to be more specific when I present my wish list to her. I’ve told her I’d like to be on a show with Stephen Fry, where we’re both there at the same moment. I’d like to be on Oprah. I quite fancy my own tv and/or radio show, and I’d like my book to sell millions. I haven’t figured out how to get the idea of Jennifer Aniston on said shows past her yet, but I’m working on it.

So be careful what you wish for, you might not have given the universe enough detail.

And here’s me on the show itself.R2 Steve Wright

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My ability to listen ebbed and flowed with my career, including seven great continuous years driving home from Hendon when I was an instructor there. I’ve laughed with him, met loads of people through his extended-question interviews, enjoyed the banter with Janey, Tim and Old woman, and marvelled at the knowledge of Ask Elvis. And sometimes he’s just been noise in the background as I struggled with some of my life’s turmoils and tears. So when I heard I was going to be on his show I found my hands shaking.

Steve pre-records many of his interviews, which I found comforting, because if I cocked up big time the whole thing could be quietly forgotten. On the day my lovely publicist from Hodder, Leni, accompanied Bex and I into an anonymous building behind the BBC in Portman square, up the smallest lift in the world, and into a waiting room we shared with Elton John’s piano and another guy who I think might have been one of the Smiths. Without much delay I was brought into the studio itself to be immediately met by a welcoming handshake from the man himself, followed quickly by greetings from Tim and Janey. Surreal.

I’d always imagined quite a spacious room to accommodate the fluctuating size of his gang and guests, but actually it’s quite bijou, with Janey, Tim and myself arranged around the outside of his desk. Very BBC cutbacks. The interview itself was a bit of a blur – but I hope the beginning doesn’t get cut, and if you’re a fan of him you’ll know why when you listen. I was aware, however, of his skill at shaping the interview and felt very safe throughout thanks to the quiet support of them all – and he generously gave fantastic coverage for Cognitive Hypnotherapy and Lovebirds, the latter of which was obviously the focus of our time together. Cognitive Hypnotherapy explained to an audience of 6 million people. It feels a bit of a milestone.

Since then I’ve been thinking about the importance of people we usually never meet. For my hands to shake in the way they did clearly indicates that meeting Steve felt hugely significant, but why? The best I can come up with is the way our brain finds comfort in certainty and habituation. If our life is a song there are certain people that accompany it, and in the modern world many are supplied by the media. I think part of the public response to the death of Diana was the sense of losing someone who was supposed to accompany our song through to the end. There are people we expect to get old with, and it’s a shock when that doesn’t happen because of the illusion of a certain future our brain tries to concoct – like a backing singer suddenly going silent, often you don’t realise their part in the song until the notes they sing disappear. Recently I mourned the loss of Terry Wogan’s retirement because he was such a part of Bex and I’s breakfast routine – I’m sure you can think of your own examples.

Steve Wright has been a quietly reassuring part of the background to my song, his voice one of many amongst the unwitting contributions of other people I’ve never met, and long may he continue in that role. I wonder if he has any sense of this importance as he goes about his everyday broadcasting routine? I hope so. Bringing him from the background to the foreground of my life made for an unlikely day, but a really enjoyable one, and I hope you have the chance to do the same some time, whoever that might be for you.

PS. My interview is going to be broadcast on February 5th, and Lovebirds is published on the 31st January.

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The only resolution I’m committing to so far, after Bex bought me a fabulous book for Christmas, is to read a poem every day. It’s not that I’m abandoning the idea of achieving things – I know that by the end of this year I will have written another book, and have launched the new-style Diploma course. I may even have run a personal best at some distance or another, and I may lose a bit of weight. So I have no doubt that this year I will rack up some things I can tick off, but they’re not what I’m going to gauge my year by, they’ll just be actions I’ll have taken. What I want to focus more on is getting better at living, and in 2012 I’ve learned a lot about how to do this from some everyday extraordinary people.

Precisely a year ago a very special woman died. Her name was Oz, and she was one of the most radiant people I have ever known. You easily get a sense of her gift for life in her blog http://www.bubbleofhappiness.co.uk/

She died after fainting and hitting her head while in India at a Yoga retreat. As random and unlikely an event as you could imagine. The accident happened the day before the love of her life was going to propose, and a few weeks after she had quit her day job to commit fully to the life she wanted to live as a yoga teacher and cognitive hypnotherapist. We plan, the universe laughs.

The world lost all the possibility having a life like Oz on the planet could have brought, and so many people who knew her have carried that loss with them all year, Bex and I included. We know that energy cannot be destroyed, it can only be transformed, and I’ve witnessed that this year. The wonderful, open, loving, joyful, adventurous and beautiful energy that was Oz has been transformed by so many people who loved her – and some who didn’t even know her – into something else that has changed them positively, in large or small ways. With Bex and I, Oz has become a touchstone for remembering to savour the moment, to dare more, to plan less, to value just being and not to measure ourselves solely by tangible results. Giving Oz a voice in our choices is continually teaching us to savour life in the moment, and has kept her with us. I don’t think she’ll ever leave.

Through Facebook her fiancé Marcus shared his year, which he’s packed with travel, pilgrimages, and volunteering in a Kenyan medical centre. Using the word ‘inspirational’ to describe others tends to be overused these days, but no other fits. I have no idea how he has found within him what it’s taken to transform his love of Oz into the action he’s taken – and the benefit to the world he’s brought. He has cared, given and shared every step of the way – and now he has transformed that spirit into a travel blog http://www.marcustravels.net/ where you’ll learn even more about squeezing the most from life than you will about places, and most of it boils down to giving service to the world, in whatever capacity you’re able. For him to be able to teach us this while carrying the loss of Oz within him is a wonder, and I thank him for it from the bottom of my heart.

Finally, is someone else who, like Oz, began as a student of mine, became a friend and then a teacher to me.

Sue Carl is a busy mother, nurse and cognitive hypnotherapist http://www.thecroftonpractice.co.uk/ Within Quest she is universally known as Loopy (as a name, not a diagnosis) because of the energy she brings into any room. You always know when she’s arrived. Her spirit and ability to extract fun from every situation is utterly infectious. Her daughter Jess is a junior member of the GB judo team and a serious future Olympic prospect. Sue obviously has had to spend a lot of time taking her to events and, not content to just sit and watch, she now assists the team.

This year, rather than sit on the settee and watch the greatest show on earth, she volunteered as a Games maker. In a previous blog I mentioned how I’d swallowed the negative press about the Olympics and responded to the feeling that it had been taken from us by vested interests (especially after only being able to secure two tickets to the canoe sprint) by distancing myself from the whole thing. My attempt at being a curmudgeon dissolved in the first 30 minutes of the brilliant opening ceremony, but even if it hadn’t, Sue’s facebooking of her experiences at the games would have had the same effect.

Her example inspired us to drive from Norfolk to Slough to watch four minutes of canoeing – and if we’d had to walk it would still have been worth it. We saw a Team GB gold medal won, and added our voice to the soundtrack of the games and our flag to the pageant. Sue taught me the importance of participation – that you’ve got to be in it to live it – and I plan to do more of that this year too.

So my year begins goal light, but intention heavy: I intend to savour – especially the ones I love – as much and as often as I can, to serve, to join in, to find joy wherever I am, and to be open to learn from everyone who has something to teach me (whether they realise it or not).

I hope this New Year brings you what you’d most like to look back on in twelve months’ time.

On this first anniversary of our loss I want to share the poem I randomly opened the book to this morning because I found myself substituting Oz for the word Hope.

Hope
Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune – without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I’ve heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

Emily Dickinson.

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Books have always been a special,almost magical, thing to me. I spent a great deal of my childhood escaping into their pages for one reason or another. I remember meeting an author of children’s books on a school trip when I was about nine, and it felt like being in the presence of some kind of mystical royalty. When I was even younger – maybe five – we were often given paper and scissors to makes things with as an afternoon activity, and I’d cut the paper into pieces and then stitch them together into a book, into which I’d begin to write a story. My whole childhood was littered with books I began to write but then lost steam with, but looking back, becoming a writer now seems almost inevitable (although I still feel very self-conscious if I call myself an author).

Lovebirds is my fourth book, and I find the whole process of writing a strange addiction. By the time I’ve finished each one I’ve been glad to see the back of it, and yet within days I’ve usually started on the next. It can be laborious, tedious and intensely frustrating, and yet there is something about the way a book emerges from the words you write that I love.

So today I placed a copy of Lovebirds beside my computer and set back to work on my next book. It’s called Grow, and it’s about growing resilient children, and being in control of your own life. In a way it’s a distillation of everything I’ve learned from my time in the field of personal development. I’m about 10,000 words in and just starting to get warm. I thought that having Lovebirds with me would inspire me, and yet I found the opposite happened. I kept distracting myself, and felt strangely flat and reluctant to commit. It took me a while to realise why.

Something I say a lot in therapy is ‘you feed what you focus on’. By that I mean that our brain is choosing what to pay attention to every moment of the day out of the huge range of options around us. Over time most people will become habituated into certain preferences of attention – for example, optimists will focus more naturally on positive things, pessimists on negative. One will spot the pound on the pavement, the other will miss it because they’re looking out for cracks. So the more we focus on a particular thing, the more we’ll find ourselves doing so. Over time we live in a world we expect to live in, rather than the one we actually do. We’re feeding what we’re focusing on, and it grows as a consequence, while other things whither.

In my case I realised that the finished book could be used to feed me focusing on one of two things about the new one: the thrill of seeing the completed work, to motivate me in my writing, or the mountain I have to climb from 10,000 words to the finished product, which is a bit of a deflating prospect. Lovebirds is 120,000 words, so there’s a lot of empty paper to fill before I get to the pay-off. And that’s what my mind had been focusing on – the struggle ahead, rather than the feelings at the end. The more I fed my focus on the struggle, the bigger it became, and the less motivated I felt. So I closed my eyes and spent some time visualising the past moments when I’ve first seen my books completed. Each one is like a birth moment, intense and overwhelming with a host of positive emotions I find hard to articulate. I bathed in those for a while, and then I started to write…

So my question to you is, in your life, what are you focusing on – the things that are a struggle – like going to the gym, another day of a diet, another difficult day of work or the things that annoy you about your partner? Or are you focusing on the feeling of achievement you get after the gym, or when you step on the scales and see you’ve lost weight, or whatever is the moment of satisfaction you get from your job, or those moments of love and appreciation between you and your partner? How you balance your focus between these choices will define the day you have, and ultimately the life you live.

If we feed what we focus on, then it makes sense to take charge of that focus – a lot of what people take from Cognitive Hypnotherapy is the realisation that they’re not stuck being who they don’t enjoy, feeling out of control of their choices, or a slave to emotions that just seem to happen to them. Just learning to spend some time each day deliberately paying attention to what you have that you want more of, to the good feelings in the day that motivate you, and the states of mind that produce the best version of you can cause major changes in the amount of fun you have being you.

Not all of us will write books, but the one thing we can all be the author of is our own story – and this is one way to take a grip of the pen and choose how the plot is going to work out for you today.

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It’s a great place to let the dogs run, and they differ in their response to freedom just as much as human siblings tend to. Fred will disappear for brief periods in pursuit of Betty, but return bursting with excitement at his daring, while Betty simply disappears – often for many long minutes, completely immune to our calling, whistling or promises of treats. She loves to follow scent trails, beyond anything else, and we reconciled ourselves long ago to the possibility that we might one day lose her to accident or angry stag in the pursuit of something she clearly needs to do. But it doesn’t stop us getting anxious when she goes beyond her average period of being ‘lost’ (and I appreciate the picture of them makes my description hard to believe. This was for a ‘butter wouldn’t melt’ commercial).

It occurred to me the other day, while holding my breath waiting for her to reappear, that the word lost simply doesn’t apply to her situation. With my limited senses Betty is lost to me once she is gone from sight in the tree-line or beyond the sound of her breathing. But I doubt that we are ever lost to her. With her amazing sense of smell and hearing I suspect she is always aware of our location, and the trees are a complete irrelevance. I realised that, if I imagined the trees gone, I’d probably always be able to see her, and that her path would be a series of wide arcs, with us as a point on that arc that she returns to periodically to check that we haven’t got lost.

My children have recently made me realise that maybe it hasn’t been so different with them. When they left home I worried about their ability to navigate life without my wisdom to guide them. Often, from my observation point, they seemed lost. I now realise they were just following an arc I couldn’t see – and like Betty, that arc is a search for what they’re looking for, not for what I want them to find. And they always knew where I was if they needed me, and, like Betty, periodically they’d return.

I realise now our children aren’t lost because they’re not following our path through the forest. They’re not lost because you can’t understand the choices they’re responding to. Often the trees I imagine them wandering in exist only in my head – to them life might appear a beach, or a wide-open space. What I’ve found is that, with my boys now 27 and 29, their arcs have led them to build their own lives, each quite different, yet both very much their own creation. And not only are they good lives, their journey has made them into men I’m more proud of than if they’d simply stuck to a path I might have chosen for them.

It’s not our place to choose our children’s arc, as much as our instincts yearn to, any more than we should keep Betty safe from our fears by keeping her on a lead. Our job is to equip our kids with the tools of travel, love them enough that we remain a point of return, and let them run. To paraphrase James Morrison, they’re not lost, just undiscovered – especially to themselves. And isn’t that act of self-discovery what life’s about? As much as a parent I’d like to shout “it’s over there!” it probably wouldn’t be for them. Show them the world, let them run, and remember to breathe. They’ll be fine, and they’ll bring home some wonderful things. Unlike Betty – last week it was a pigeon.

Only later into writing this did I realise that this metaphor applies to me as well. I thought I was sharing a learning I’d taken from my boys that might resonate with other parents, but now I realise it probably has a personal application to most of us. I spent a long time on a path marked through a forest subtly signposted by my parents (with my best interests at heart) and lit by my society, and as I look back now I was more lost on a well-defined route than I’ve ever been since I left it. When I finally abandoned it for my own arc, propelled by my own scent trail that I absolutely had to follow, I found happiness, fulfilment and like-minded people following their own trails. And my arc was opposed. I realise now that fellow-travellers on the forest path would have seen my swerve into the trees as a mistake in my orienteering – I remember to this day a colleague in a stab-proof vest asking me how I could abandon the security of the police with only 12 years left to my pension? I was about to include my parents in that lack of understanding when a memory suddenly came back to me: On the day I left the police I got a card from my mum wishing me luck and expressing her faith. She didn’t understand my detour, but she didn’t try to tug on my leash either. Annoying; both that she’s wiser than I ever give her credit for, and that at the ripe old age of 53 when I thought I’d finished learning about being a parent and was going to start on the grandparenting, I clearly haven’t.

When it comes to our own life I think it’s important to be aware of the choices we’re making and why. What others on the well-travelled path saw as a detour was actually the beginning of my real direction. My journey up until then had been a detour. Necessary in so many ways, and easily mistaken for the real thing, but a detour nonetheless. We find many students of Quest arrive at our door in response to that same realisation.

And you have to be ready for the fact that nobody else but you may understand your choice – until you meet others following their arc. To paraphrase Hugh Macleod, the more original your life choices, the less good advice people will be able to give you. So, if you have a scent in your nostrils that irresistibly stirs your blood, he says to ignore everybody. If you’re like Betty you won’t have to, yours ears won’t be listening anyway. That invisible scent your children are following could be to the life they’re here to live. That trail you feel drawn to could lead to the same thing. My advice is, take a deep breath…and run.

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