There's a lot of whacky stuff out there in the world about hypnosis. Most people think of "watch the watch", trance inducing spirals, people having their minds taken over and start clucking like chickens.
It's really much simpler than all that and a lot more of an every day experience than you probably realize.
Hypnosis in the context of creating change is a way of facilitating an experience, where someone can become focused and absorbed in that experience so that they can move from their problem and towards their solution.
If I ask you to what was the worst thing that happened last week, you will look for the worst things. If I ask you what was the best thing that happened last week, you will look for the best things. In both those examples I am directing your attention to focus on the worst or the best. This is hypnosis. And we hypnotise ourselves with the thoughts we have and the things that we say to ourselves every day. All language directs our attention, to focus on particular things. All language is hypnotic.
Trance is also an everyday occurrence. Has your mind ever wandered?
Have you ever been driving and realised you have no recollection of how you got to where you are because your mind had gone off somewhere else?
That's all trance is.
Milton Erickson defined the hypnotic trance as a state of increased awareness and responsiveness to ideas.We can utilise trance to bypass our conscious mind chatter and go straight to the unconscious for faster, wiser more creative solutions.
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