A Presentation for the GA Chapter National Guild of Hypnotists, May 5, 2000

Conversational Belief Change

Wesley Anderson, Doctor of Clinical Hypnotherapy

I'm going to start by telling a story.

There was a man in ancient China who lived near the great wall of China.  Now one day his son went out and came back with a wild horse he has captured, and the old man's neighbor said to him, "What a wonderful thing!  What good luck!"

The old man replied, "Well, who can say whether this is good or bad?"  The next day the son was breaking the horse the horse threw him and the son broke his leg.

The neighbor said, "Ahh, what a sad thing, your son has broken his leg.

Now the old man said once again, "Who can say if this is good or bad?  Now the next day the army comes through the village conscripting men for the army, but the old man's son, being laid up with a broken leg doesn't have to go into the army and doesn't have to go off to war.

The neighbors said, "Ahh what good luck, your son gets to stay in the village."

Now the Old man again replied, "Who can say if this is good or bad?"

This is going to be the topic of the presentation for this evening, "Who can say if this is going to be good or bad".

Now the presentation has been billed as NLP and I guess it is, I learned the "sleight of mouth" patterns from NLP. Sleight of mouth patterns are methods of inducing conversational belief change. It's about the L in NLP. The linguistic part.

Now does anybody know what a belief is? Anybody got one?  What is a belief?

Unknown Speaker: I'm a child of God

Welsey: "I'm a child of God".  Ok, now there is a belief.  Now can you bring it out and put it on the table for me? How much does it weigh?

Unknown Speaker: Not very much.

Wesley: Right, not very much. Beliefs seem like they are solid, yet they are just mental constructs. We change our beliefs day in and day out. "I believed the car had gas in it until it wouldn't go any more, the needle went down to empty.  I had put some more gas in it, but I guess my belief was wrong.  It has some gas in it now, but it didn't have it before." Those kinds of beliefs change very easily.

"I am a child of God".  It would take a lot more to shift that kind of belief. It is one of those kinds of beliefs that people tend to hang onto very strongly.  So if we think about how we experience the world, and the words that we use to express how we relate to the world, then we can take that information and start asking our clients what they believe.  Which is really important because when we know how they linguistically represent what they believe, then we know the glue that holds those beliefs together, and begin to understand how they are making themselves stuck. 

For example, someone mentioned addiction and tobacco earlier. I got myself in trouble on the internet by writing a review of a book, "The Idiots Guide to Hypnosis".  I looked at the chapter on smoking.  Thinking that would give me an idea about the quality of the book.  So I looked through there and what the author presented is the standard line. "Nicotine is addictive, blah, blah".  Nowhere in the chapter do I see anything indicating that hypnosis makes it easier to quit.   Continue...