Motivation via Hypnosis

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Permalink Reply by James Malone on June 1, 2010 at 10:56am

Walt, generally speaking I don't believe that hypnosis provides "motivation" in the traditional sense as much as it can help people move past a stuck state of disbelief, where the individual doesn't live up to his or her full potential because of a negative self-prophecy.

However, they really have to have a burning desire to change in the first place.

Its been my observation with behavioral change work that the person for example who asks "can you make me want to quit smoking" is looking for a magic bullet that will remove effort and accountability on their part and I try to avoid these exercises in futility.

With someone who has ambiguity about a consciously desired change I will often spend some time beforehand eliciting what are their overall core values in life. Sometimes during the process they discover that making the healthy change honors their true self. Jim

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Permalink Reply by Dennis Atkinson on June 1, 2010 at 11:20am

I agree James. The motivation has to come from the client. All we can to is offer the client the ability to find the skills to change the behavior and create a more positive motivation

James Malone said:

Walt, generally speaking I don't believe that hypnosis provides "motivation" in the traditional sense as much as it can help people move past a stuck state of disbelief, where the individual doesn't live up to his or her full potential because of a negative self-prophecy.

However, they really have to have a burning desire to change in the first place.

Its been my observation with behavioral change work that the person for example who asks "can you make me want to quit smoking" is looking for a magic bullet that will remove effort and accountability on their part and I try to avoid these exercises in futility.

With someone who has ambiguity about a consciously desired change I will often spend some time beforehand eliciting what are their overall core values in life. Sometimes during the process they discover that making the healthy change honors their true self. Jim

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Permalink Reply by Bruce Taylor C.Ht on June 1, 2010 at 11:24am

I would have to agree with James and Dennis. In my opinion the client has to be somewhat motivated already and needs a little nudge. The more motivated the better the response to hypnotic suggestion.

Bruce Taylor

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Permalink Reply by Don on June 8, 2010 at 12:43pm

Hi Walt,

The problem with human beings is that we're lopsided. We have a highly developed cortex which will allow us to formulate many long-term goals. The rewards for achieving these goals, of course, are in the future. But we need to be able to experience these rewards now in order to have enough motivation to attain the goals we have set for themselves. And, with 99% of the genes of our closest simian cousins, the chimpanzees, our brain's emotional centers often just aren't up to the job. That's where the Best Me Technique comes in. You could call it a procedure for remembering the future to empower the present. Let me illustrate what I mean.

Unlike other forms of visualization, meditation, and goal-directed imagery,the "Best Me Technique" is a systematic, comprehensive method for involving your whole person in the content of a suggested event. Every letter in "Best Me" corresponds with an element of suggestion, and these elements can be applied in a variety of ways (Gibbons, 2001). In the present example, multimodal suggestion is used to to enable an experientially gifted individual to pre-experience a future reward -- in this case, graduation ceremony -- as a part of one’s present motivation to pursue a course of study leading to an academic degree. It was initially developed through work with a client who was a Nursing student at DeSales University, who had been able to overcome "examination doldrums" by pre-experiencing the rewards of her capping ceremony, and validated by other clients with different long-term goals such as weight control and smoking cessation.

To maximize meaningfulness and motivational involvement, a series of such experiences may be employed as needed on a regular basis, all related to the same central goal. By regular practice with a series of such experiences, it is possible to provide yourself with the inspiration and incentive for lifetime of achievement and personal growth towards a wide variety of distant goals. (But don’t forget to make whatever changes in your environment you can in order to smooth the path – and, if possible, to create a series of meaningful sub-goals along the way which the client can also thoroughly enjoy!)

At the conclusion of an appropriate induction procedure (Gibbons & Lynn, 2010), suggestions such as the following may be provided. The original Best Me order has been retained for the sake of clarity, but in actual use Best Me suggestions may be presented in any order and repeated as often as necessary, with appropriate variation and elaboration, much as one might repeat the verses and choruses of a song.

Belief systems. Now you can feel your awareness of the present beginning to fade, as you become ever more clearly aware of yourself seated at your graduation ceremony, waiting to go up and receive your diploma. Just picture the scene, and imagine yourself excitedly waiting there, until it becomes just as real and just as clear to you as if it is happening right now.

Emotions. Let yourself feel an ever increasing sense of pride and achievement as you savor this moment to the fullest.

Sensations and physical perceptions. As you look around at your fellow graduates and at the crowd of family, friends, and well wishers who have come to share in your success, you can truly rejoice in the thrill of all you have worked so hard to accomplish.

Thoughts and images. The graduates are getting up one row at a time to form a line beside the stage until their name is called. When it is your turn, you join the line and await your turn to go up and shake hands with the Dean and receive your diploma. And all the time, you are realizing how much this means to you, and how much it has all been worthwhile.

Motives. Now, as you walk across the stage and shake hands with the Dean, he smiles and hands you your diploma, and you return to your seat. Let yourself take a few moments now to bask in the satisfaction of a job well done, and savor your achievement to the fullest. [Pause.]

Expectations. And each time that you return to this treasured memory of the future, it will become easier and easier for you to believe it will happen, expect it to happen, feel it happening, and savor in advance the fruits of your success.

The session may then be terminated in an appropriate manner (Gibbons & Lynn, 2010).

Don

www.hyperempiria.com
References

Gibbons, D. E. (2001). Experience as an art form: Hypnosis, hyperempiria, and the Best Me Technique. New York, NY: Authors Choice Press.

Gibbons, D. E., & Lynn, S. J (2010). Hypnotic inductions: A primer. In S. J. Lynn, J. W. Rhue, & I. Kirsch (Eds.) Handbook of clinical hypnosis.(pp. 267-292). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

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Permalink Reply by Jan Krüger on June 8, 2010 at 11:50pm

There are lots and lots of approaches to motivation. Here is a condensed version of what I think has the best chances of working.

Push vs. pull. Motivation can either be away from pain or towards pleasure. The first kind, of course, always keeps pain on your compass much more than pleasure. I think that the second kind is much more promising. Personally, some time ago, I had a really persistent case of not being motivated. My tendency had always been to be motivated away from pain, and I had slowly developed it to the point where I needed a lot of pain in order to do something. Well, there just wasn't enough pain, so I ended up not really doing anything at all for almost three years, slowly burning through my savings (and there were still enough of them left for it not to be painful... I don't really spend much). So I just felt bad about not feeling bad enough yet.
Of course I'd tried time and again to focus on pleasure instead... but as long as the pain was still there on the horizon, it just didn't work out. So eventually I decided to do something more radical, and I eliminated the pain. I went through all the painful consequences and realized that they weren't really painful in themselves: for example, being broke isn't painful if you don't allow it to weigh you down. You may end up without a home and all alone, and by almost any standard that's horrible. But there are always standards according to which you don't have to feel bad!
I adopted those standards, and the pain slowly disappeared... and at some point, I didn't feel pressured anymore. I decided to hold off doing something for a few more days, to let the new feelings solidify... and then I went ahead and got that large thing done that I'd been putting off forever... in just five weeks.
Most of that time I didn't actually work on that thing, I admit... and I'm pretty sure I haven't eliminated all sources of pain yet. I still put off a lot of things. But I did finish that large thing, and the result was actually very good.

Clear direction. The other problem I'd been having was that I wasn't even sure that I wanted what that large thing was supposed to give me. All right, let's be more specific, all the evasive words are getting annoying. It was my Bachelor thesis, in knowledge engineering and computer science. Well, at that point I wasn't really sure that I wanted to work in that field, and so I was kind of ambivalent about the idea of doing a lot of work to go somewhere I didn't actually want to go! But, of course, I'd done a lot more work to actually get to that point, so I could think to myself: well, if I don't write that thesis now, all that previous work will have been for nothing... never mind whether I actually want that degree. Degrees are always handy to have. So even though I was leaning towards not wanting the degree, I still felt bad about not getting it.
While I was doing all that pain elimination I talked about above, at some point I started thinking about it in a different way: I could finish the degree and go do work in that area, and use the money I made with that to finance the things that I actually wanted to do. At the same time, for perhaps the first time in my life, I seriously started considering just taking any random job and just doing the same thing with that money. Suddenly I had a viable choice! I could just stop working on that degree, get a job that didn't pay very well, and do a modest amount of interesting stuff on the side, or I could finish the degree, find some kind of better-paid job and end up doing more interesting stuff. Notice how that mindset is not pain-based at all; it's completely pleasure-based.
Of course, intellectually I had already known that I had this choice – many well-meaning people had explained it to me countless times – but I hadn't ever seriously considered the implications.
When I really thought about the options and what they would mean, and which parts of the pain were really illusionary, things started becoming much easier.

I'm now doing the follow-up Master's programme, and I still don't really know what I'm going to do after that. But I do know that I'll come up with something that will be good enough for me, and that's really all that matters right now. It's certainly enough of a clear direction for me at this point.

So where was the hypnosis in this post? You tell me.

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Permalink Reply by Don on June 9, 2010 at 2:14am

When there is no clearly-identified goal upon which to focus, or when existing goals are not desired strongly enough to fully motivate a person to achieve them, I have sometimes have good luck with multimodal suggestions such as the following, which may be given to to an experientially gifted partner to facilitate goal selection and to increase the enjoyment of goal attainment in general. (See my blog entry on personal transformation.)

Belief systems. Now we are going to help you to experience in concentrated form, both your desire to achieve and your ability to feel the satisfactions you are going to feel in the future from the fulfillment of a job well done.

Emotions. We are reaching down into the depths of your vast, untapped potential for feeling happiness and joy. Great waves of happiness and joy are flooding out from the depths of your potential, growing stronger and more beautiful and more intense with every passing second.

Sensations and physical perceptions. The waves of joy are becoming stronger and more intense, filling and flooding every muscle, and fiber, and nerve of your entire body with a beauty and which is greater than anything you could possibly imagine.

Thoughts and images. Your mind is filled with such beauty and such joy that it is impossible to think of anything else, and all you can do is feel these waves of joy washing over you., growing in beauty and intensity with every passing second.

Motives. This is the kind of fulfillment you will be able to feel when you put your whole self into doing a job – any job – well. And you will have plenty of energy left over to enjoy every other aspect of life to the fullest.

Expectations. And I don’t know whether this experience will leave you with new goals, or with a re-dedication to the ones you already have. But either way, it will be a transforming moment, for it will have the power to change your life.

Of course, it does help if the client a history of goal-directed behavior somewhere in one's repertoire of responses. My wife was recently seeing an unmotivated teen who was mandated for counseling by the court after being arrested for a drug offense. If he showed up at all, he would characteristically arrive late, and just sit there mute and shrugging his shoulders once in a while. Eventually, she had no choice but to report him to his parole officer for flunking out of therapy.

Don

www.hyperempiria.com

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Permalink Reply by Walt Potter on June 9, 2010 at 2:57am

Don and Jan,

Thank you! These are really useful comments. I see how I can use them with the person I'm working with and with myself!

Walt

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Permalink Reply by Steve Andrade on June 9, 2010 at 4:53am

Walt,
I’m glad you brought this up.
Motivation is not something I have looked into yet. I have ideas and remember some teachings. I’m going to throw out here, in fragments maybe, what I think about motivation in hopes of learning more and motivating me to look into having a better understanding of motivation.

Currently I have a deep interest in understanding, “Expectations,” but I can shift over to, “Motivation,” I welcome the shift.

When I was taking NLP classes I remember, and I would have to go back through old notes to remember more precisely, motivation being associated or related to “values.”

We are motivated to do the things we value. That if you want to be more motivated about something, you had to move that thing up on your scale of values.

And if you want to know what a person values, just look around the person. We display around us and with our behavior and what we are naturally motivated to doing, the things we value.

There was a process of how to shift your values that I don’t quite remember but remember that I would be able to refigure it out if ever needed to. And then values and beliefs had a relationship. At that time, I went out and bought the book, “Belief,” I think it’s by Dilts, I have not read it yet, but thought that someday it would come in handy to already have it purchased.

Anyway, I do have a theory about motivation that I haven’t yet implemented, I think even the person who comes in saying that he has no motivation and wants some, already has some. He is motivated to do something along the lines of the opposite of what he is asking to do. For example, mowing the lawn, let’s say the guy never wants to mow the lawn and wants motivation to mow the lawn.

What does he do instead of mowing the lawn?

Let’s say he likes to relax on the sofa and watch tv.

Some would say he is lazy, I think he values relaxation and is motivated very strongly to relax every chance he gets.

Where the neighbor might value what “others think of him” and an un mowed lawn will cause people to thing things about this person that will bother this person tremendously so he mows, and mows.

So the motivation is there in both cases, it is just utilized for different things.

On the other hand, what about anchoring one behavior that is the motivation for one thing to a trigger that would recreate the action, “motivation,” to do what the client is asking for.

Does that change the value?

What if you applied the motivation that the guy who sits on the sofa has to relax….”you know how wonderful it feels to finally, at the end of the day, plop down on the sofa with that cold beer and turn on the game, can you feel how wonderful that feels?” and take that motivation that is there and anchor it to another trigger and associate it to mowing the lawn?

Would you be changing the person’s values by doing this or if the person really doesn’t want to change their values, will this motivation not take place?

I’m hungry to learn.

Steve

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Permalink Reply by Jeannie Martin on June 13, 2010 at 9:31pm

I would ask to speak to the part that keeps _______ from doing ________
If it is a smoking issue, I would ask to speak to the smoker.
If the client don't get motivated to do much of anything, I would ask for the Part that keeps _________ from getting things accomoplished.
I would dig and dig for parts until a part steps forward. You may have to make a deal with the Part to support ______ in doing one task at a time until he/she completes it, and get an agreement effective immediately. Get the Part to agree that (Client) will pick the one thing that he/she will complete. (Dont let the Part pick -- just gets its agreement to fully support).
When you get the agreement, ask if there are any other parts that will not support this one thing and go from there depending on the response.

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Permalink Reply by Walt Potter on June 15, 2010 at 8:23am

Thank you all!

It appears that there are some things that one can do to help with motivation!
Removing blocks sounds really useful.

Walt

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Permalink Reply by Katherine Zimmerman on June 15, 2010 at 3:12pm

I haven't taken the time to read in depth everyone comments but... I had a session today for motivation. And he's obviously somewhat motivated or he wouldn't spend his time and money coming in.

At any rate, I did an NLP swish with him. He could hardly wait to get out of the office to go home and get busy. Now it may not last but if we need to we can follow it with parts therapy.

Just my 2 cents.
Katherine

Walt Potter said:

Thank you all!

It appears that there are some things that one can do to help with motivation!
Removing blocks sounds really useful.

Walt

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