Freed of Fear of Public Speaking in One NLP Session

Let's call him Fred. Fred even got nervous when he just talked about his fear of public speaking. As Fred was describing his efforts to overcome his frustrations and fear, he mentioned that he felt like he was banging his head against a wall when it came to resolving his problem. That caught my attention. It seemed to me that Fred was regularly going into some not so resourceful hypnotic states, and that he needed to be hypnotized into a better reality.

Hypnotherapists have long known that the unconscious mind thinks in metaphors, images, dreams and associations. The unconscious mind is also very literal in its understanding of language. It will appreciate every possible literal and metaphorical meaning from a sentence. For example, "He kicked the bucket" will be understood both as, "The person died" and "The person kicked a bucket."

I asked Fred about his wall. How high was it? What was it made of? How far did it go? Could he walk around it? Climb over it with a ladder? When I asked how high the wall was, and about the possibility of climbing over it, the wall got taller. That wall was going to be stubborn!

The wall was about a foot in front of Fred. It had to be close, of course, because he was "banging his head against it". Fred was sitting in the recliner in my office, which happens to swivel. So, I told him to leave the wall where it was (I made a hand gesture "holding" the wall in place) as he turned to his right about 90 degrees.

When he turned, I asked Fred, "How is it now that the wall is on your side"?

"It opens up an unlimited vista!" Said Fred. And, from there, it was easy for Fred to imagine speaking well in public, and enjoying it. Once he did that, Fred was able to respond to some simple NLP techniques that helped build a new set of feelings and beliefs that have caused him to speak comfortably in public since. I know, because I heard him speak in public a few weeks later, and he did a fine job. After he spoke, Fred looked over at me grinned, and gave me a thumbs up!

How a Student Lost Her Foot Phobia in Hypnosis

I was doing a presentation about entering hypnosis as a profession to a group of sixty or so teenagers, when it happened. I mentioned that I had helped a number of people get rid of unusual fears, and one of the young women in the audience stood up and announced that she had an unusual fear. Then she insisted that I help her with it right then and there.

I hesitated, because there was only a brief bit if time left before another group was due to use the room. However, she was insistent. So, I asked the logical question, just what was she afraid of? The answer was that she panicked when someone touched her with their feet.

One of the most effective ways to eliminate a fear or phobia is for the person to run the triggering thought backwards repeatedly in his or her mind. Fears are neurologically patterned responses, and running the pattern backwards scrambles the pattern so much that it stops working. So, I had the young lady run the image/thought of being touched by feet backwards from panic, to the foot moving away to the beginning before anyone had made a move to touch her. After she had done that a few times (it takes some repetition to install the new pattern) she was feeling some better.

Then I said to her, “What is 'feet' backwards? It's 'teef'. Then in a comically exaggerated voice I cried out, “Oh no! Teef!”, and she started laughing. It was perhaps the first time ever that she had laughed at the idea of someone touching with their feet. By that time the young lady was feeling a lot better about “teef!”.

However, she let me know in no uncertain terms that she was not finished with her fear, and insisted on coming up to the front of the room for me to eliminate the rest of it. Time was running short, but I agreed. So when she walked up to me I shook hands with her in a special way that let me guide her into hypnosis in just a few seconds.

So there she was with her hand suspended in air, hypnotized, as I gave her unconscious mind instructions to only lift her hand to her face at the same rate as it completely resolved her fear of being touched by feet. As she slowly lifted her hand towards her face over the course of about ten minutes, the young lady was trembling, tears trickled down her face, and the sixty of so teenagers in the room were completely still and absolutely silent.

Early arrivals from the next group started to filter into the room, and the young lady's hand was only halfway to her face. There would not be time enough for her to finish the process in front of the room. So, I gave the young lady's unconscious mind instructions to finish up in its own time, and in its own way at the unconscious levels while she came back to her normal conscious state and did what she needed to do for the rest of the evening.

I got an email from the young lady about a week later. She said that she had decided to go into psychology, and practice hypnotherapy as a career. She is now completely free of her old fear.

Ending Test Anxiety With NLP and Hypnosis

Test Anxiety? Using hypnosis and NLP (neurolinguistic programming), it can be simple and quick to eliminate anxiety and turn it into competence based confidence.

Imagine having studied for an important test. You walk in and find that the most difficult part of the test is writing your name on the top of your paper. A few days later grades are posted, and you have earned an A. How much anxiety does that imagined test produce? Chances are, absolutely none.

NLP teaches that the structure of our thoughts determines the quality of our life and experience.

Now imagine just before walking into a test bringing up emotionally charged thoughts of humiliating failure, with a side of intensely critical self talk, and predictions of doom. Test performance in those circumstances is going to naturally degrade. That is a good example of bad self hypnosis. Hypnotizing oneself into an anxious state before a test is bound to get in the way of highest success.

Most of the clients that I have worked with for test anxiety admit to using something like the second strategy. They did not consciously decide to psych themselves into a losing mindset before tests. It "just happens" to them.

It is my job as a hypnotherapist to teach them how, with a little rehearsal, to put in a new self hypnosis routine that automatically bring up self confidence and engages their best performance on tests.

First, it is necessary to eliminate the self defeating mindset.

We can think of a thought as a sequence of impulses running through a set of neural pathways in the brain. To function properly, he pattern of impulses must repeat itself in the exact same way each time. Having the client reverse the sequence of the mental movies by running the images and soundtrack backwards from the end to the beginning causes a new set of neural pathways to be associated with the thought of taking a test. This causes the original emotions, the anxiety, to disappear. And, the client can then learn to associate new feelings of confidence in test taking. That is accomplished by simply using compelling mental rehearsal of success to generate positive expectations.

There may be other dimensions to eliminating test anxiety, such as assisting the client to develop new beliefs about his or her capabilities, and skills. And, there are some simple techniques to improve test taking skills as well. But, the heart of building test taking confidence is simply replacing the old ways of thinking about a test with expectations of success based on reasonable preparation and study.