London Hypnotherapy|CBT|NLP Coaching

Ever seen the film Almost Famous? 

A wild guitar band some say depicts Led Zeppelin, its groupies and a cub reporter pile onto a tour bus after a particularly brutal night that’s left everyone discombobulated. Everything, it seems is coming unravelled. Everyone is frazzled and not happy. Elton John’s Tiny Dancer comes on the radio. As the song plays, one by one, each person’s mood begins to turn from hardened anger to harmony. It is not conscious, it is not planned.

It just happens. Patterned responses created over years dissolve. My favourite scene and it is pure magic.

Cognitive Hypnotherapy knows that such transformations can be a very powerful part of therapy.

A momentary awakening to the intense ‘mad’ patterns we’ve adopted. Maybe its taken years to grind those patterns into existence, in a heartbeat, we become unusually open to the idea that we can choose to respond differently.

This is what cognitive hypnotherapists call creating a new pattern.

Both in Neuro Linguistic Programming and Hypnosis this pattern interrupt experience is created as a therapeutic mechanism. At my Central London Hypnotherapy centre, I use it regularly as a powerful tool. One of the most interesting and powerful NLP Neuro Linguistic Programming techniques is the Hand Shake Interrupt made famous by Milton Erickson and of course Derren Brown.The handshake pattern interrupt is a very powerful way to induce rapid hypnosis.

As you may or may not know the handshake interrupt is simply interrupting the process of a handshake, which causes a momentary blank in the brain and bringing the subjects hand up to their face, whilst using hypnotic NLP language to bring them into a trance state.

Applied to business and networking it’s a powerful tool to disarm peoples’ kneejerk defence mechanisms and programmed responses and open them to considering a new product, solution, approach or idea.

It’s something the best speakers, salespeople and marketers use on a regular basis…though some may be oblivious to exactly what it is they’re doing that’s getting such good response. And, it’s something the top copywriters and bloggers do as well. Check out the headlines used by expert copy writers.

So, why should you care about all this?

As a Cognitive Hypnotherapist, I believe that pattern interrupts give you the power to change behaviours, opinions, assumptions and decisions in the blink of an eye. They also allow you to better see opportunities that are created on a more spontaneous, organic level all day long and dive into them to open doors and create opportunity.

Say you are doing some training or a speech and you get the graveyard slot. Introduce something that INTERRUPTS THEIR PATTERNS. Such as putting on a hat, wearing a funny wig, looking outside at the weather, dare to be outrageous! Speaking Interrupts- create short windows to allow you to continue to dazzle them, introduce new ideas and thread a series of continued pattern interrupts through his presentation to keep them from sliding back into the dead zone.

What about on a personal level? Next time you feel yourself sliding into that same argument you’ve been having with your partner, lover or wife or husband, in different forms for years. Before you get too deep and too intense. Get up, and do something totally different. For example:

In The Incredibles (a fantastically well written cartoon), the whole family is fighting with each other when someone knocks at the door. They immediately stop the fight and forget what they were arguing about.

A good friend from Australia used to stare and point at the ceiling for 5 seconds. Then continue.

 You could say, “Did you realise your shoe laces are undone?” Or start jumping up and down on the spot. One of my favourites is dramatically pretend you’re about to sneeze. If you feel you're about to cry, look upwards and jump up and down and this will shift you away from crying.

I know that whenever anyone, anywhere drops tray of food in a cafeteria (school, college, airport, hospital, etc.) everyone always stops whatever they were doing and stares at them. I know multiple times that after such tray is dropped, it’s difficult to think about whatever we were talking about before.

So, there are lots of types of things that pattern interrupts could be used to stop or change (anger, fear, silliness, mourning, obsession, rising tension, compulsion, and probably hundreds of others I'm not even thinking of). Guaranteed, you’ll get a very different response. A spontaneous, surprise-driven disarming action. You can use that reaction as a moment of awakening to the lunacy of refighting the same fight and an opportunity to explore approaching the conversation a different way. You may come to realise, too, a pattern interrupt is not a new pattern. In my London Hypnotherapy sessions this is crucial.

It’s only an event that breaks the stranglehold of the old, destructive pattern, giving you a window to introduce a new one. And, if you don’t take the opportunity, that window will quickly close, leading all to slide back into the same old, same old.

So, have you experienced anything like this? Have you tried it as a chance to change course? Because, it only takes a moment…