But if you ONLY learn from your mistakes,

then you will learn very slowly. Learn from your mistakes certainly, and in addition seek a mentor, guide, teacher, coach. Regardless of what you do or aspire to do, there is someone who can help you move forward more effectively than you can even imagine (because you’re not there yet).

learn from those who have traveled the road ahead of you.

It’s rash to imagine that you can attain your best without wise counsel, support, and mentorship. If you feel that you have gifts to offer the world why would you deliberately hold yourself back from doing all you can from maximizing your ability to share them? Professional athletes have coaches, great spiritual teachers have mentors, and organizations have consultants.

Even the Dalai Lama has spiritual advisers to instruct him. The best athletes may have an entire squad of coaches and trainers. Leaders with the greatest responsibility and reach seek guidance from those whose perspectives they trust.

Why would you imagine that you deserve less, or could achieve your best with less?

The more creative and competent you are, the more this is true.

I have always looked for teachers that could guide me and help me move forward. I now invest a great deal to find teachers who will do more than that; who will move me forward, hold me accountable, and kick my butt (and my ‘buts’). Sometimes it feels scary. I have learned that when it does I am likely on the verge of a new and exciting opening, personally or professionally.

Two key principles make up the Psychology of Success. There are a multitude of details for how you achieve success, but here are two important principles, which when you apply them, puts success, however you choose to measure it, within your grasp.

My father had lived through the Great Depression, and when he spoke of success he meant that someone had made a lot of money. Much to his consternation, he was never very successful at making money himself, and in his later years came to depend on my mother. Like many people who never fully realized their dreams, he found ways to mask his disappointment. As a child I rebelled against his singular notion of success; in part because his disappointment was so painful to witness.

The dictionary tells us that the word success started its life meaning that something was concluded, something was done. Good or bad, intended or not, when a thing is finished it has arrived at its own successful conclusion. You could say the we all live the life of our dreams. Consciously or unconsciously we all strive towards our own desired outcomes, and we achieve them according to our own internal capacity (or otherwise) for inner congruence and focus. So, in the broadest sense, we are all successful.

Success now means something more specific; a desired outcome, rather than just any old conclusion. We always have a choice in how we do things. The criteria and the necessary actions for our success is something we must determine ourselves. Some people have the mindset that allows them to regularly fulfill specific goals and ambitions decisively — whether it’s to climb a mountain, or to be the first to climb a particular mountain, or to climb many mountains. Whatever our mountain might be, each of us, deep down, has our own measure for our own specific success, regardless of whether we attain it or not.

So, what does success mean for you? Is it an abstraction, or do you have specific goals, your own  specific mountain? Perhaps you have learned to live with disappointment. Perhaps you are afraid of failure, or perhaps you are afraid of success. What picture do you have of your life ten years from now, twenty years, fifty years? Maybe you have heard that you should simply let things ‘unfold by themselves’? You know, even a blank slate, or an open door, is effectively a picture too.

What about happiness? Is happiness the measure of your success? As a child, questioning my father’s correlation of success with money, I looked for an alternative to his version of success, and began to equated success with creativity, beyond mere happiness, towards ecstasy and creative abandon. I was a romantic even then! I was uncomfortable with, and confused by my father’s notions of success because he provided no role model, other than his own failure. I did not yet have any idea that I might be responsible for my own outcomes, let alone how I might go about achieving them.

Success implies measurement. It involves assessment and comparison. We measure ourselves against others, and against what was and could have been. You might say that looking for happiness by comparing yourself to others is madness. Yet, we do it anyway, out of habit, because it is how we first learned to live in the world. It is how we learned to make the choices that now define who we are.

On our journey from infancy to adulthood it was by comparing and judging ourselves against others  that we formed our core values and identity.

But success has very little to do with finding happiness outside of yourself by comparisons with others. Assessment is necessary, but judgment and comparison may be optional extras.

Assessment begins with having clearly defined outcomes. This is the first of the two principles of success. When you have clearly defined outcomes, you either fulfill your intention, or you learn that you missed something on the way. You ask yourself why, you can even go a step further by saying, “This is the best thing that could have happened.”  The mindset you create with that statement helps you put your next clearly defined outcome into action, whether it concerns the moment-to-moment details of your daily life, or addresses the big picture, call it your destiny.

By having clearly defined outcomes, by asking what lessons there are for you to learn, even when challenged by impossibly difficult situations, you are no longer a victim of circumstance. You are now living at cause, choosing your own life. And isn’t choice the key ingredient here, the key to your success? You move freely, assessing what you have gained or missed, and self-correcting as you go. You are learning  to say, “This is the best thing that could have happened!”

The second of these two principles for the psychology of success concerns how you focus your attention. Your focus can be like a zoom lens. You can magnify small details, or you can have a wide view. You can be specific, or you can be more abstract. When you move through varying degrees of abstraction and specificity, you evaluate your options in ways that are impossible when you hold to a single perspective.

By zooming out to greater degrees of abstraction you are often asking, “Why? For what purpose?” By zooming in to greater specificity you are asking, “How? What specifically .. ?”  You can even direct your awareness in another direction outside of your immediate range of view to find analogies, and a broader context. You ask, “What are other examples of this?”

Some people are caught in details, and never get to see the big picture. Others are lost in abstraction and never get to apply their larger vision. Many people rely on only one singular point of view. When you know the difference between the vision and the details, when you learn to move easily between the two, when you learn to take another tack to find new perspective, then you have an edge that allows you to give what meanings you choose to such notions as success or failure.

There’s another element, a theme more essential than any psychological principle of success. It has to do with the simple capacity to focus, to sustain awareness. Combine that with the principle of well formed outcomes, and the principle of choosing your level of abstraction, within a hierarchy of possible perspectives, it becomes the glue that allows you to navigate your life with a proficiency that will let you define your success entirely on your own terms.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Hypnotic Induction

10:26 minutes

The unconscious mind is a boundless resource, and repository. Within it is everything you are not now considering …  yet …
including any new paradigm and possibilities for your own positive transformation.

Here’s a gift of a trance induction for
Mind-Body Well-being, Healing, and Transformation.

Note: do not listen to this while driving.

Comments

Your attitudes and mindset,
your ability to be effective as a leader,
your ability to lead yourself,
your ability to live ‘at choice’

… all this depends on your unconscious programming. In other words it depends on the beliefs that have been instilled in you by a process that is very much like hypnosis. Fortunately, mindset and attitudes can be transformed through the use of hypnosis far more rapidly, and with far greater ease, than is often understood or appreciated.

The hypnotic state is a doorway to your unconscious mind. Your unconscious mind is everything you are not currently aware of: for example, that meeting you are nervous about, your love of going to the beach, the excitement you felt on your eleventh birthday, an unkind neighbor, a tune that pops into your mind inexplicably. The unconscious mind is the ten-trillion things that you couldn’t possibly hold in conscious awareness at any moment, but which together make up the climate of your experience.

However, the unconscious mind is more than a memory-bank. Experience is determined by emotions. One person may love going to the beach, another person may detest it. Everything you experience is filtered through emotions and perceptions, and the subtleties of associations through which you make meanings from your life.

Imagine a child being told by his mother to clean his room. Perhaps his mother was having a difficult day and speaks sharply, “Can’t you tidy your room, what’s the matter with you?”

Somehow the child hears that there’s something the matter with him, and years later, on an unconscious level, he carries that message everywhere he goes.  He carries it to social gatherings, and job interviews. He may even carry it to bed. He may have conscious recollection of that day, long ago, when his mother was impatient with him. He may have discussed it in therapy. He may have learned that it wasn’t about him. But still the pervasive belief persists. It will continue until he registers a new truth about himself on an unconscious level as completely as he absorbed that first message long ago.

The amazing truth about your mind is that it can learn and change very quickly. How long did it take for that child to learn ‘there’s something wrong with me?’  He learned it in an instant, and a new truth can be learned at the same speed, but only if it is absorbed on the deepest level, deeply enough to supersede the old patterns.

People often say that hypnosis performs miracles. If you imagine that the attitudes that inform your behavior have to take a long time in order to change, then hypnotherapy is indeed miraculous. The power of hypnosis is the power to access your unconscious mind. Perhaps you have been disempowered by repeated vain attempts to effect change through willpower, conscious strategy, and reason. You may feel that you have a long way to go before you can truly transform old limiting beliefs, but you do not need more information or skills. When you’re ready to effect change, the last thing you need is more time! What you require is very simple. When you can access the same open mind you had as a child at the moment when you heard those fateful words, then you can learn your new truth, “there’s something right with me.”

A skilled hypnotherapist will guide you towards your own natural ability to remember deeper truths about yourself. She will help you access your capacity to write your own scripts, reprogram those old programs.  The truths you recover predate the time when trauma hijacked your original innocence, capabilities, and joy.

Hypnosis is like finding the light switch after fumbling around in a dark room for years.

Sometimes all you need to find that switch is permission from your own unconscious mind. Hypnotherapy is a miraculously effective way to gain permission from, and access the power of, your unconscious mind, to bring about radical positive permanent change.

Hypnotherapy Hypnosis in Los Angeles ‘when you’re ready for change’

Eleven day Training Intensive

Condoning or Condemning?

Keeping things simple can be a comfort. But sometimes comfort does nothing to move you forward. It doesn’t challenge you, or help you to learn new perspectives, and create new possibilities for yourself.

I am talking about the assessments we make of others.

You ask yourself, “Do I agree with you?  Do I accept you? Am I safe around you?”

If  you conclude, “I disagree. I don’t trust you.” You might also inadvertently add “I don’t understand you,” “I don’t like you,” or even “Because your belief system and values are different from my own there may be something wrong with you.”

Sometimes the most interesting thing can be to spend time with someone who is completely different from you. It may challenge you. It may be uncomfortable and edgy. But it  may teach you something new about yourself and your own presuppositions and assumptions.

If you always need others to agree with, it may be because you lack confidence in your own perspectives; or it maybe that you’re just taking yourself too seriously.

If you have only two options:

1. Agreeing, condoning, liking, approving, trusting, or
2. Disagreeing, condemning, disliking, disapproving, mistrusting.

then you may be missing a range of other possibilities:

• challenging your assumptions and strategies
• refining your communication skills
• deepening your empathy
• getting over yourself
• having more fun
• learning to be more flexible
• deepening your perspectives

In the world of NLP it is axiomatic that to help other effect genuine change it’s essential to respect their model of reality. Otherwise, how do you imagine you can genuinely communicate with them, let alone influencing them? Beyond that, it’s also to your benefit to do so.

Respecting others’ model of reality doesn’t mean condoning that model; but it does save you the aggravation of having to oppose it, condemn it, or persuade them they are wrong.

What sort of anxiety would lead you to spend all your time only with those who agree with you anyway?

Stretch a little. Spend a little time with people who make you uncomfortable and notice some of your patterns which, once noticed, you can change – if you choose.

You don’t need to know anything about Neurolinguistics, or NLP, to do this. It may just be an expression of you own evolving emotional intelligence.

Eleven day NLP and Hypnosis Training Intensive at Manzanita Village

Transformational Change

Five questions about generative transformation

What is Transformational Change? Transformational change is generative change. Personal change comes about in many forms and for many reasons. Most change, most often, is to accommodate outward circumstances. It is remedial. We react rather than truly respond. We react automatically, based on what we already know, rather than looking for new, and possibly transformational solutions. So often we struggle just to extricate ourselves from present difficulties, rather than looking for new ways of doing things which will support us in an ongoing way to transform our sense of what is truly possible. Transformational change is regenerative change. You can even call it generative in that it allows you to come to entirely unprecedented perspectives, with unprecedented capacities for innovation and solution based responses to hitherto intractable problems.

Is Transformational Change permanent? By implication transformational change means a permanent shift. Transformational means never being the victim of circumstances again. It means using skills that allow you to recognize that everything you experience from this moment on can be taken as a lesson, a guide, and even a gift. When you make this perceptual shift, whenever you face a new challenge or a disappointment,  instead of asking “Why is this happening to me?” you will ask “What can I learn here?”

What aspects of my life does Transformational change touch. Were does it fit in? Is this a spiritual practice? Is it psychology? Is it learning new communication skills? Is it learning to navigate relationships more skillfully ?  Is it business coaching? Is it personal development? The answer is yes. It is all and any of these. The more you live not just as the accumulated effect of everything that has touched you, but as a cause, as someone who lives at choice, the more you instinctually appreciate that everything is interconnected and part of single integrated whole. As you live by this systemic perspective, releasing old patterns of though, feeling, and behavior become second nature to you. Why would you need to entertain negative emotional states again?

Does Transformational change take long? Does this work of effecting transformational or generative change take a long time? Here’s a parallel question. If someone shows you a shortcut that will cup your daily commute in half how long will it take you before you use it  every day? When you’re ready to change, change happens very quickly.  The foundation for this work can be undertaken in a couple of days  of intense one-on-one focused process that will transform the way you think and feel, and in addition will give you the tools to maintain and deepen the transformation we co-create together.

Do I have to meet with you in person? You are welcome to do that, and I personal enjoy working face to face at out Los Angeles office, or at our retreat in the mountains, however we can meet equally well by telephone.

I hope this answers some of your questions about transformational change. If you would like to schedule a complimentary no-obligation conversation with me please contact me directly

Tel +1-310-339-1660
Email  info@caitrionareed.com

… and then around January 15^th,
or March 1at (if you’re lucky) it’s all a memory?

Maybe not. But if you do, here are five possible reasons why.

1. Because you’ve done it before, and have entirely negative associations with your January 1^st resolutions. You’ve become used to failing at them, you may even expect to; at least on an unconscious level.
2. You have no real strategy. You may join a gym but you have not sat down and worked out exactly when you’re going to get there, made an appointment with a trainer, set up a schedule, and developed a long term strategy.
3. You have not made yourself accountable, or if you have it’s with people with whom you have shared your New Year’s Resolutions before, and who have come to expect you to fail at them. Of course, expectations like that are contagious.
4. You’ve set yourself up using negative associations – lose weight, stop smoking, stop doing this or that, abstaining, ceasing, and desisting. It would be better to imagine your future year by using positive terms and associations.
5. Deep changes can’t be accomplished by an act of will alone. Something inside must change too. My work as a hypnotherapist in Los Angeles – World capital of New Year Resolutions (just kidding, I have no idea!) -  tells me that people change when they start identifying internally with the new behavior, and with their new self. Then the steps to get there are simply a question of time and strategy.

The first few days of January are not necessarily the best time to implement new behaviors and habits. Then again, it’s never a bad time to make positive changes to your life, through hypnosis, or by whichever means you choose.

Diagnosis Kills

Hypnosis has been around for as long as consciousness itself, much longer than depression, which is relatively new on the scene. If we are stuck in a mood it is as if we have been hypnotized. When we absorb information, whatever it might be, it is because we have taken it in through a process that is effectively hypnotic. As young children we are in a state akin to hypnosis all the time. We learn to make rapid associations unconsciously, and we become adept at responding to life, based on those associations. We have learned unconsciously to do what we do, to feel as we feel. Hypnosis is that function of the mind that allows us to absorb information unconsciously. Sometimes, when the information we absorb is intrinsically contradictory, we respond by feeling depressed.

Let me ask you: what is the capital of France? I assume you know. I would like to ask you to reflect for a moment on how amazing it is that you can access the name so quickly, instantaneously, from all the countless other pieces of information that are available to you. The access you have, as well as all the various possible choices you have in how you respond to whatever comes your way, such as that question, for example, is anchored within functions that are also effectively hypnotic.  

You may have heard how in certain cultures a curse, or a hex, a 'magic' spell, can actually cause someone to die. It has been well documented, and although we may not succumb to such magic, we are equally susceptible to the effects of our own, often equally inexplicably irrational, belief systems.

Your belief system determines how you operate. Your belief system can even make you do things against your own best interests. It can trigger strong emotions based on the way it forces you to interpret the world. Based on your interpretations, your beliefs ever more solidified. Hypnosis can be used to address the limitations that come from that solidification, it can help you melt rigid beliefs, such as "I am  depressed."

I often work with clients who have been diagnosed as 'clinically' depressed, or bipolar, or with a 'chemical' imbalance. The diagnosis often serves the clinician who gave it, and the drug company who provides the drug prescribed for it, more than it does the client. In the short term. that prescription may be a lifesaver. In the long term it may become part of a debilitating life sentence.

My issue is that individuals are sometimes forced to live for years with a diagnosis that traps them, reinforcing the behaviors that caused depression in the first place. Depression is something you learn to DO. Diagnosis tells you that it is who you ARE.

If it is who you ARE you are doomed. If it's something you DO, then you can stop doing it as soon as you know HOW.

EVERYTHING is chemical in one way or another. EVERYTHING is behavioral too. Many things respond exactly the way you expect them to. The filters your expectations impose on your perceptions make sure of it. A chemist looks at chemistry, a behaviorist looks at behavior. A hypnotist asks HOW you can do something different from what you have been doing, so that your life can work better.

Hypnosis can change a lifelong pattern of depression because it addresses the deep underlying and often unconscious behaviors and beliefs that have supported it.

Living in the Light

Humans are diurnal. That means we live our lives by day, unlike owls, bats, badgers, (as well as a few musicians I know). Most of us need light to feel at our best. Even if it's only a few hours a day. Along with light comes physical activity, looking our towards the horizon, looking upwards with your eyes; a few simple physiological actions that engage you with the external world.

Take a comfortable deep breath or two. Look upwards, relax your body. Be aware of everything that's around you. It should take no more than a few seconds to do this, to reconnect with where you are.

Depression is a withdrawal. Reconnecting with people and things; moving; engaging creatively with the world, even when you don't feel inclined to do so, will change your mood. This is only a beginning; but explore how easy it is to begin. You might be surprised to lean that you really CAN change your mood.
 

Honesty is the Best Policy

I do not want to diminish the debilitating effect of depression. It's something I suffered from myself for many years; and during that time the depression felt entirely non-negotiable, impervious to anything I might do to shake it. Then something changed. I learned that the depression was a choice, and that it was something I DID, rather than something I WAS.

I learned that there were moments of choice, when I could choose how to interpret my experience. My interpretation could affirm whatever I wanted. If I wanted to believe that my life was not worth living, the evidence was certainly there; and if I wanted to believe that my life was full of promise, I discovered that I could choose to believe that instead.

I also learned that my depression had a lot to do with living in a way that was not entirely truthful and open. When I was not in full congruence with myself, when I was not 'walking my talk', I tended to become isolated and depressed. What that means exactly might be different for each of is.

Suffice to say, we can all benefit from coming out of whatever closets we hide in to prevent ourselves from being who we truly are, and from expressing the fullness of our creative capacity.

In my Los Angeles hypnotherapy practice, I have used hypnosis for depression with countless clients. I would say that a majority of the people who come to me for hypnotherapy, regardless of what else is going on in their lives, suffer from some degree of depression, mild or otherwise.

I am not suggesting that hypnosis is a universal cure for depression, but in my experience hypnosis works with depression to help you recognize that you are not just a victim of your emotions.

You do have a choice about how you deal with depression; just as you have a choice in how you deal with everything life sends your way.

• A friend in Los Angeles told me today, "I met someone who does NLP. They were really weird. They kept looking at me in a way that was really intense and off-putting."

• Other people tell me that NLP feels like a cult. Apparently they have encountered newly-certified practitioners of NLP who were so excited about the tools they had learned that they couldn't curb their enthusiasm.

• Some people have experienced NLP as inappropriately applied sales techniques, used by unscrupulous sales people, to persuade customers to buy things they didn't need, or want.

No doubt there's truth in all of this. Anything that works well is going to have a downside.

For many of us, life is almost unthinkable without the convenience of cars and airplanes; yet both cause incalculable damage as pollutants, and kill people whenever they crash. Name anything you like, and you can discover ways in which it is misused, or causes harm – language, love, religion, food. At one time or another, everything has been used to gain power over others.

As for NLP, one of the misunderstanding common among beginning practitioners and clients alike, is that it consists of a series of techniques or patterns. There are certainly a lot of them. There are even books available with compilations of hundreds of such patterns. But this misses the main point. NLP is not primarily about techniques or patterns. If you imagine that this is what it consists of, then it's certainly going to be weird, and somewhat unsatisfying, a never-ending accumulation of strange exercises. So what is NLP?

More than anything else, NLP is – the mindset that recognizes that any behavior or internal mental state can be changed.

To be effective, an NLP practitioner must believe this in their bones, and they must then communicate it to their client, by whatever means are available to them. Only then can the tools and patterns be used effectively to cement the transformation that has already begun.

Are those patterns and tools necessary? Absolutely! But the initial acceptance of the possibility of unprecedented transformational is a prerequisite. Otherwise the tools are mere tricks; and the client will end up with yet another reason to believe that nothing can help them overcome the problems for which they came to see you.

As a hypnotherapist, my practice changed completely as soon as I recognized the vital importance of my explanation, and demonstration, of the power of the mind to effect previously unimaginable transformation.

Once the client has truly absorbed this, then the work begins. Once the reality of the possibility for almost unlimited transformation is understood by the client, then they can imagine a new destination for themselves. The rest of the work has to do with planning the journey, removing the roadblocks, negotiating the inevitable diversions, and undertaking the journey itself. Is it always as simple of that? Actually, yes.

There are, of course,  many different sorts of roadblocks, and many ways of approaching the journey, many possible roads to take; as many roads, in fact, as there are individuals taking that journey towards congruence and fulfillment.

And yes, it is that simple!

In the presence of an experienced hypnotherapist, or practitioner of NLP, you will not experience the weird feeling of being scrutinized. Instead, you will feel like you are having a conversation with a good friend who has your best interest at heart, and who also happens to have the skills to help you to embody those changes you are seeking. You will experience a feeling of being seen, and heard, and understood, and appreciated, and supported.

If not, look elsewhere.

It's as simple as that

. April 2010 NLP certification program