How This Actually Works

No mysticism. No pendulum. No dressing it up.

Think about the last row you had with someone you care about.

You said something. Probably something you had been sitting on a while. And an hour later, in the car or on the stairs, you thought: if I had waited five seconds that would have gone differently.

Everybody has done it. I have done it.

What happened is that the alarm went off before you had an opinion. It picked the response and the words were out. The part of you that would have said something better was still on its way.

You were not out of control.

That is the same thing behind most of what people bring me. The temper that arrives before the thought. The decision you would take back by the following morning. Lying awake running the same conversation again.

Almost nothing your brain does is done on purpose.

You did not decide to be frightened of that. You did not decide your heart rate. You did not pick which face in a crowd to look at twice, or which memory turns up at midnight. You did not decide to stop sleeping.

Deciding happens in the part of you that is reading this. The rest of it, which is most of it, gets on with things whether you are paying attention or not.

That is why telling someone to calm down has never worked on anybody.

So that is what this is. Not talking you into feeling better. Getting at the part that is actually running the response, and telling it what you have told me you want. To sleep. To stop the noise mattering so much. To not go off at your daughter over the dishwasher.

There is a part of your brain that plans, weighs things up and sees where a decision leads. That is the part you think of as you, and when you let it get on with the job it does it well.

Underneath it there are three others, and none of them ask your permission.

The first is the amygdala, and it is the alarm. It works like a smoke detector. It picks up on something before you are consciously aware of it, and it cannot tell the difference between a real emergency and burnt toast. It will call the fire brigade for either.

The second is the hypothalamus, and it is the chemist. Once the alarm has gone off it decides what your body does next, which is the adrenaline, the heart rate and the cortisol that keeps you on edge waiting for something to happen. It is why the temper arrives before the thought, and why afterwards you cannot say what set it off. The chemistry got there first.

The third is the hippocampus, and it is the archive. Everything that has ever happened to you is in there, along with what you did about it. If something worked once, it is filed as a solution and offered back the next time anything looks similar. The file does not know the situation has changed.

Between them they are quick, they are not clever, and they were built for a world where getting it wrong quickly mattered more than getting it right slowly.

Then there is the part that empties it out. Everything that gets to you in a day goes into what I call the stress bucket, and the only thing that empties it is sleep, in the dreaming part of the night. Miss a fortnight of that and you are carrying a fortnight nobody has dealt with. Today lands on top of yesterday, which landed on top of the day before.

That is why I start with sleep, whoever you are and whatever brought you. There is a free guided sleep recording if you want somewhere to start.

Clinical hypnotherapy is part of what I do, and it is nothing like what most people picture.

You have been in something close to it several times today already. Driving a familiar route and arriving without remembering the journey. Halfway through a job and not noticing the phone go. Twenty minutes gone to a screen.

Your brain does that on its own, several times a day, without being asked. All that happens in a session is that it is done deliberately and put to use.

In that state the part of you that argues with everything goes quiet for a while, and it becomes possible to work on a response directly rather than talking around it.

What people picture is the stage show. Somebody clucking like a chicken because a man in a suit clicked his fingers. That is entertainment, the volunteers are there because they want to be, and it has nothing to do with this.

You do not go under. You do not lose control. You cannot be made to do anything you would not otherwise do. You will hear everything, remember everything, and you can stop at any point.

The part of your mind we are working with will not accept something it knows is not true. Tell it you are going to win millions on the lottery and nothing happens, because it can see perfectly well that you are not.

So the work goes the other way round. What would having the money actually change? What would your week look like, what would stop keeping you awake, how would you be with the people around you? That is the real target, and almost all of it turns out to be reachable from where you are now.

What I can do is take that and put it where it will get heard, rather than leaving it with the part of you that already agreed.

After that it is your job. Go to bed at a sensible hour. Have the conversation you have been putting off. Notice it starting and use what I have given you instead of what you have always done.

Do that and it holds. Do not and it fades, and no amount of sitting in my chair will make up the difference.

That is not me hedging. It is the whole reason it works. Something you did yourself is something you can do again next year without me.

I trained at the Institute of Hypnotherapy in London. The qualification is the Hypnotherapy Practitioner Diploma at Level 4, externally verified by NCFE, which is the standard the professional bodies in this country are built around. Alongside that, a Level 7 coaching qualification.

Five approaches, and I use whichever the situation calls for. Most sessions use more than one.

That is not indecision. A practitioner with one technique has to fit the client to the method. The point of having several is that the method follows the problem instead.

Solution-Focused Brief Therapy

The approach everything else sits inside.

It starts from an unusual place. Instead of asking what is wrong and why, it asks what you want things to look like, what is already working, and what the next small step is. Developed by Steve de Shazer and Insoo Kim Berg in the 1980s, and now used in the NHS, in social work and in coaching.

Its own governing rules, and I have never had to translate these for a business owner. If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it. If it works, do more of it. If it isn’t working, do something different. Small steps lead to big changes. The solution isn’t always related to the problem.

That last one is the one people query. It means we do not have to excavate the cause to change the outcome, and a great deal of the time we do not need to.

Two things it does in practice, and they go together. Scaling, which is a number out of ten on the thing you came about, asked every session. Then the miracle question, which sounds odd and works. Suppose tonight while you are asleep a miracle happens, and the thing that brought you here is gone. When you wake up, how would you know? What would be different?

Both get asked every time, and that is the point rather than a routine. After two or three sessions people start working out their answers on the way in, before I have asked. That is the thing doing the work.

On its own that number does not tell you much. I had a client who sat at six and a half or seven for all of his sessions, and every week he would tell me what the people he worked with had said to him about the very thing we were working on. It had clearly shifted. His number had not moved at all, because his number was really about the week he had just had.

So I do not go on the number alone. What tells you is what you are doing differently, what other people have started saying, and the three measures taken properly at the start and again at the end.

This is why the work is time-limited rather than open-ended. It was designed to be brief.

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy

The one most people have heard of, and the one your GP would most likely mention.

What you think affects how you feel, which affects what you do, which affects what you think next. Somewhere in that loop there is usually a thought that is not accurate and is being treated as fact.

Thought records are the main tool, and they are less involved than they sound. What happened, what went through your head at the time, what you felt, what the evidence actually is either way, and what a fairer version would have been. Written down, because doing it in your head is where it goes wrong.

Then there is behavioural activation, which works the opposite way round to what everybody expects. Rather than waiting until you feel better before you do anything, you do the thing first and the feeling comes after it. Unglamorous, and one of the better supported things in the field.

And graded exposure for anything being avoided. Small steps, each one managed before the next, rather than being thrown in at the deep end.

Clinical Hypnotherapy

Reaching the responses that happen before you have chance to think. Advice cannot get at those, which is why people know exactly what they should do and cannot make themselves do it.

The tools inside it: suggestion, visualisation, metaphor, reframing, which is putting a different and more accurate meaning on something, and rewind, sometimes called the fast phobia technique, used to turn a memory that is still live into an ordinary one.

Neuro-Linguistic Programming

The one with the shakiest reputation, so I will be straight about it.

Some of it is very useful and some of it has been oversold for forty years. The parts I use are the practical ones. Anchoring, which attaches a response you have chosen to a particular trigger, so it is there at the moment you need it rather than half an hour afterwards. The swish, which moves your attention as something starts rather than once it has finished. And reframing.

What I have found, and the training says the same, is that it works quickly with somebody who is not already overloaded and struggles with somebody who is. So it tends to come later, once the sleep is back and there is room to work with.

Mindfulness

The word puts people off, and that is usually because of what people picture rather than what it is.

You are almost certainly doing some of it already. The walk you take when you need to clear your head. Driving with the radio off. Ten minutes outside with a coffee before anybody else is up. Sitting on a riverbank watching a float that has not moved for an hour. Whatever you call those, they are the only part of the day when your attention is on one thing, and that is the whole of what this is.

Paying attention to what is going on now, on purpose, without immediately arguing with it. Kabat-Zinn built the first proper version of it in the late seventies for hospital patients in pain, and it has been used the same way ever since in sport, in workplaces and with people looking after somebody at home.

It is not emptying your mind, which cannot be done anyway. It is not relaxation, although most people find it relaxing. And you do not need incense, a cushion, or to sit in any particular way.

Where I use it most is the ten minutes before something. Before the meeting you have been dreading, or before you stand up to speak with four other things still running. Three slow breaths and your attention on one thing will do more for you at that point than reading your notes again.

And it puts a gap in. Something happens, and instead of the answer arriving fully formed, there is a moment first. If you have ever wished you had taken five seconds before you spoke, that gap is what this trains.

There is a study from Sweden worth knowing about, because it is not what people expect. When they looked at who actually burns out, it was not the ones coasting. It was the conscientious ones, and particularly the ones whose confidence in themselves rested on how well they were doing.

How I Decide Which

Sleep first, almost always, whatever brought you. Everything else is harder while you are not sleeping, and it is the quickest thing to shift.

After that it follows what you tell me. Something happening faster than you can think tends to want the clinical work. A belief being treated as fact tends to want the cognitive work. Something being avoided wants graded steps. A pattern already going in the right direction wants leaving alone and doing more of.

You do not need to know any of this to work with me. It is here because you asked, or because you want to know what you are buying before you buy it.

The order is deliberate.

We open with what has been better. Then the work, which for executives goes into what is actually happening and where the pressure is landing, and for clinical clients stays forward-facing throughout.

Then a turn towards what you want instead, before any trance work begins. That matters: the state you are in going into trance is the state the work consolidates. So the difficult conversation happens first, and the couch comes after.

Then the trance work itself. Then a few minutes on the week ahead, and we finish.

Executive clinical sessions are ninety minutes, because the business comes first and then what it is doing to you. The Resurgam Protocol runs two hours a session. Retainer sessions run ninety minutes.

You set the numbers, at the start and throughout. Not a personality questionnaire, and not my opinion of how you are getting on.

There is a reason it is done that way rather than left to how you feel about it. Nobody can assess their own judgement from the inside, because the thing doing the assessing is the thing in question. Numbers you set yourself, compared at the start and at the end, sit outside that.

If they have not moved, we change what we are doing or we stop. I will not sell you sessions that are not working.

Qualified clinical hypnotherapist, psychotherapist and executive coach.

• Hypnotherapy Practitioner Diploma, Level 4, externally verified by NCFE, awarded through IHT London.
• Level 7 Executive Coaching, UK Professional Development Academy.
• Law degree with the Open University, and a Master’s in construction law and dispute resolution with Leeds Beckett.

Trained in solution-focused therapy, cognitive behavioural therapy, cognitive restructuring and mindfulness-based approaches.

• Fully insured for professional indemnity and public liability.
• Enhanced DBS check.

There are things that are not mine to take on, and I will tell you in the first conversation rather than four sessions in.

Where somebody needs a psychiatrist, a psychologist, a GP or an audiologist, that is what I will say, and I would rather lose the booking than take it wrongly.

Where you are already under specialist care, that care leads and I work with it, with your permission and in writing.

I provide the music, so you need nothing but somewhere to sit and a phone or a laptop.

The work does not need silence around you. A quieter room helps, because the mind wanders less, but if the only place you have is an office with a door that does not quite shut, that is fine.