We’re off to see the wizard, the wonderful Wizard of Oz!

We’re off to see the wizard, the wonderful wizard of Oz!

Because, because, because, because, because…..

(please indicate your choice/s with a tick, cross or question mark):

1. because you’ve always wanted to go to the Emerald City
2. because the wizards can change beliefs with words (e.g. ‘because he has weapons of mass destruction….’)
3. because he would make a much better president of the European Union than Tony Blair (but then so would anyone else who hasn”t actually launched mass murder in the name of democracy whilst positioning himself for the most powerful yet undemocratic appointment contrived since the dark days of the 1930’s)
4. because a change is as good as a rest
5. because the flying monkeys are becoming something of an irritation
6. because motion clarity matters (panasonic)
7. because beanz meanz heinz (heinz)
8. because you’re worth it (l’oreal)
9. because it’s nearly christmas
10. because the exchange rate is favourable

So now you can relax, because once upon a time, before we all knew as much as we do now (now that we are six) there were fewer reasons why we might have thought we were unable to do what we love simply because we would all love to, wouldn’t we? So let’s explore this notion (because notion clarity really does matter, as does nation clarity) .

If this is true then it follows, does it not, that we can, even though we may lack a degree of specificity as yet, embark upon our journey. For the time being, because time is short and memories are long, and/or the other way around  let us assume that you would love to embark on something you are not yet embarking upon, because we need some kind of reference point before we set sail. Point to where it is you think you would like to go right now, however unsure you might be, and off we go.

Now there is a point to all of this. The point of your own choosing, and having completed the Oz test, you are aware that all that stands between you and your destiny-nation is a ‘belief ‘ which is just another way of saying a story, which is just another way of saying a ‘narrative journey’.

So, once again, once upon a space (it’s a ‘narrative journey’ so you won’t be needing any sense of chronological order), point to the point in your story at which, now that you are aware that it only ever is a journey, you realise it would have been better had the narrative journey set off on the right foot. Or the left.  

Cue Munchkins. Follow the yellow brick road! Follow the yellow brick road!

Well if you must. But you could be missing a trick. There is more than one road and there are many nations and what seems to mattter is setting off on the Right foot. Or hiring a taxi, or chartering a plane (the flying monkeys will never get to you at 30,000 feet), or taking the train. Or to put it another way, it’s not the road, nor the route, nor even the destiny-nation, but the way you behave and respond to what happens on the way BECAUSE if you find yourself headed somewhere awful… if you find yourself not enjoying the journey…. if you realise there are better places to be and easier ways of getting there….. you can change direction and be happy that you are learning all the way!

An idiot. Or was it a flying monkey, before I learnt to fly, once said to me in British Telecom that I could only change my career path one more time BECAUSE after that other people would stop taking me seriously. What she really meant was that I was very good at my exisiting job and that if I changed jobs she would have to recruit someone else and that would cause all kinds of problems (like she would have to work out what the hell I did because she would have to get someone else to do it or her goose would be cooked). I don”t personally recommend goose as an alternative to turkey. It is very fatty and tends to shrivel up in the oven. And just to put things straight, what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander because a gander is a goose, for God’s sake!

So that’s like saying what’s good for Tony Blair is good for the rest of us… no, wait a minute, the rest of us are not sanctimonious, mass murderers suffering from monumentally psychopathic grandisoity… oh well, but you get the general idea, don’t you?

By the way, there is no need to get upset about Tony BECAUSE it is just my opinion and this is a democracy (oh no, hang a dictator a minute, I don’t actually get to vote for the President of the European Union. Come to think of it I don’t get to vote on whether there is a European Union either. You can rig a gallows or an election but you Karzai your cake and eat it, can you Tony).

This week I have been mostly travelling down the pathway of (what is the opposite of reconciliation?) …. ah yes, a-lie-nation! Good old fashioned marxist concept except that Marx doesn’t have a monopoly on alienation. I would say that the thatcherites (Tony ‘I’m Secretly Jesus’  Blair and his profit, Margaret ‘It’s My Funeral and I’ll Die When I Want To’ Thatcher) have done an excellent job of instilling a-lie-nation into every nook and cranny of society over the last 30 years.

When he does finally turn up at a press conference wearing a purple velour track suit claiming to be the Messiah, or just God,  I think we should send Tony to the Wizard in the Emerald City with the following note:

‘Dear Wizard of Oz,

As you yourself are only too well aware, it is all spin (in both the political and the quantum mechanical sense). The enclosed ex-prime minster is, however, suffering from the delusion that it all means something and that somehow he is someone important in all of this. The bad news is he started two wars but has left the rest of us to finish them whilst he pursues the path of ‘greatness’.

We would all be very grateful if you would find him a new path. Somewhere out of the way would be good, like Kansas, or Texas (I think he has friends there).

Before he is despatched you might like to consider how to deal with someone who is convinced that he intelligent, caring and courageous because he knows how to ‘take the tough decisions’. Like whether or not to impose mass destruction and suffering upon innocent civilian populations whilst alienating further generations of young men from ‘less advanced cultures’. In fact, if this is what courage means, we would be very grateful if you would take Tony’s ‘courage’ away altogether because it might save hundreds of thousands more lives at some time in the future. Unless you can eliminate this kind of ‘courage’ we would also sugggest you do NOT give him a brain or a heart because these could be construed of as WMD’s  in the hands of someone who manifests ‘courage’ so devastatingly.

Finally, on another matter, The Tin man wants to know if WMD40 really is that high in cholesterol because he saw an advert about keeping a healthy heart and now the low fat magerine is clogging up his joints.

Dorothy says ‘Hi’ and can you send Tony to Texas because things are already pretty bad in Kansas right now, what with the weather and everything.

The Straw man is at Oxford studying Philosophy, Politics and Economics and The Lion says, ‘Grrrr’, in an affable kind of way (you know he is just a big softie really!)’

Finally, some of you may be wondering why I am so horrible about Tony. Well, you decide… is it because….

(please indicate your choice/s with a tick, cross or question mark):

1. him and Ali Stair Head Case Soup Tin decided that having power was more important than defending the moral, social and political principles that got them to the top in the first place?
2. he adopted the morally bankrupt notion that the end justifies the means, or even that there is an ‘end’?
3. he fell into the trap that all people who adopt the above approach fall into… the means become the end (in Tony’s case, the end of many thousands of lives)?
4. he lacked the real courage to tell George Wisteria Bush that he is a moral cretin (look for the deliberately unspecified referential index and syntactic ambiguity, NLPers!) and that 20 years from now we’ll all be driving cars powered by algae-derived biofuels and Texas will be a real desert as well as a moral one
5. spin only works short term. People soon develop that uneasy feeling of having been betrayed. That’s when alienation kicks in.

So, if like me, you are fed up with living in A Lie Nation just remember how it started and who turned lying into THE END of your country. What amazes me is not that we have home grown terrorists in this country but that there are so few of them. Young people are peculiarly adept at sptoting blluhsit.

Jsut as you are extermley good at undesratnidng wrods and prhases whcih are jbmuled up (it may take a litlte tmie and efrfot but you konw it mkeas snese!)

Personally I am open to all kinds of politics. I am happy for politicians to experiment (preferably peacefully) with any number of different routes to greater social well being and human enterprise. As Donald Duck, US Defence Secretary, said in 2003, “we know where they [the weapons] are. They’re in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat.” (Sorry that should be ‘Donald Rumsfeld’, it just sounds even better if you imagine Donald Duck saying it)

Well, Donald Duck, the search for social well being, peace, harmony and nobility really should focus on areas to the east, west, south and north somewhat of where we are right now and I am more than happy to go in any direction just so long as we leave the lies and the liars behind. I’ll try anywhere as long as it is not a Lie Nation.

The way to get people to behave honourably is to behave honourably. The way to promote the truth is to be unambiguously truthful. The yellow brick road to social, moral, economic, human and political justice is the way which is socially, morally, economically, humanly and politically justifiable. The means should always be consistent with the end, the journey should always be consistent with the destination, especially because…

As far as anyone knows, there is only the journey… there is no end. If we can’t travel honestly then what is the point?

You’re a ‘christian’,  Tony.

You know how the liturgy goes ,

‘As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be: world without end. Amen.’

Timmy Timely’s Ticker

Timmy Timely ticked.

I hesitate to say that is it, but it is, almost. It had started when he was born; well just before he was born; a few months. Nine months.

The moment of the first tick is not important inasmuch as defining the precise time when Timmy Timely first ticked is of less consequence than the fact that he persisted in ticking. 

And tocking.

Many of his many detractors were prepared to tolerate the ticking, but few would countenance the tocking for there is something unwholesomely persistent about a person who both ticks and tocks, alternately. So they said.

Now, to get backwards before the problem began it was already over because by that time we could look backwards, in fact we will have little else to look at but backwards, but we are not all there yet and it seems a shame to rush when it is all over so quickly in any event just because we could but lots of us do and once in a while I am all for it as long as it is not overdone. But just for the sake of ARGUMENT…. to get backwards before it all began to go wrong, things were ticking along nicely.

Well when I say that they were ticking along nicely, without Timely Timmy, they were not exactly ticking at all because he wasn’t but he soon would be and before he did they were, even though they weren’t because it is all just a metabephor bedtime.

It’s ok. You can lie down now. I am going to tell you a story.

Timmy Timely was born on the ninth day of the ninth month after the day after which he first began to tick (and tock). It was a Spring day. No-one thus far has admitted to winding the spring and no-one knows whether the spring is being wound now  (that’s what we call a clue) but it must be a very long spring if it isn’t. Either way, horologically speaking, the whole winding sheet wherein the instructions are laid out clearly and with unbelievable precision omitting only that small element of chance and free will which makes it all so hopelessly unpredictable, is a wind up. Now to get backwards before the problem began, things were already winding down at the very moment we were all being wound up because spacetime is relative.

Up could be down and quarks can also be top and bottom or strange and charmed as well as up and down but they cannot be separated so that up/down is in fact a complete and indivisible entity just as a tick or a tock are somehow inadmissible without their counterpart.

This was all well and good (except if you were one of the people who could not countenance things even though you did anyway) but then another problem emerged. This was before and after the other problem in the sense that it emerged in previous generations but then emerged again with Timmy’s emergence, so technically there was a whole sequence of emergencies none of which was especially urgent but of course that was the WHOLE problem (we’re NOT going into the HOLE problem here. Things do emerge. We do not have to say from whence. I refer you to some very old newsletters now which may themselves re-emerge once we have sorted this hole mess out).

The whole problem was that Timely Timmy, as he grew older, started to make small but measurably significant perceptual errors. No-one, who is quite an authority on all of this, was entirely sure at what point the errors began. Some say that it was before the problem began and others say that it was at the indefinable point at which something happened. Either way, Timmy gradually, imperceptibly almost, began to become aware of a sense of acceleration.

He tried a whole load of things to catch some time out like not watching watches for hours at a time and then suddenly watching them to catch them out speeding up but it didn’t work.

Sometimes he would pretend to be asleep and then wake up in the middle of the day having pretended a bit too hard to find that it was the middle of the day and he hadn’t done a thing yet.

As it got worse, he began to become aware of something his mother had referred to as deaf. At first it fell on death ears with alarming results but like the rest of us he soon got used to it falling and he even wondered if the falling was the same as the acceleration because gravity is just a form of acceleration relatively speaking.  But then he fell upon bad times and these times gave him a deafining headache.

The bad times became very clear to Timmy Timely. Had he not ticked nor tocked he may, like most of the rest of us, been able to largely ignore the whole problem but uniquely for Timmy there was a hole in his logic. It was the kind of hole that first ticked and then tocked.

A metbephorical hole which resulted in a heightened state of consciousness of the kind which generally leads to a fall even though you have met before and know what is coming now.

Let me put it simply (thank GOD!) Timmy Timely started to speed up time.

The huge irony of course was that his intention was to slow time down but the more he ticked, the more he tocked. At that point which we all reach at some point where we realise that time is running out Timmy Timely decided, like John Donne or was it Andrew Marvell, that if he could not make time stand still he would make it run. This was not quite what he decided but the opposite of what he decided, but in effect it was what he decided because that is what he achieved and whether a decision is an intention or a consequence is outside the scope of this article because we are running out of time and time is running out too. If I had known how much damage it would do to my joints I would never have run that bloody marathon.

Anyway, a much simpler way of putting this would be to say that he crammed. Not biscuits into his mouth, although he was prone to, but increasingly demanding activities into decreasingly short periods of time in a vain attempt to get everything sorted out before he became deaf to the ticking and then tocking. Many people, on their deaf beds at this time were heard to mutter that the imminent absence of a tick or a tock would be a blessed relief, but the more Timmy thought about this (and he thought more and more about this until he thought about nothing else) the more he crammed.

And here is the really strange (and charmed) thing about all this.

The more he crammed, the faster he ticked. The more he crammed, the faster he tocked.

Now it may not be at all obvious to you yet exactly what the significance of this remarkable correlation was and this may be doubly so should you be unfamiliar with the concepts of world time and experiential time which like quarks are two parts of an indivisible yet distinctive pair. World time is of course predetermined by the world (more specifically by units derived from the constant and continuous rotation of the Earth) whereas experiential time is entirely subjective and is based on the seeming duration of time to any given individual. Neither of them actually exist of course but if we get into that we really will run out of time.

In short, time accelerated in time with Timely Timmy so that as he crammed more and more into time, time got shorter and shorter to the extent that eventually Timmy Timely realised, too late, for it was his dying day, that all he had done was achieve exactly what he would have achieved had he not done so so quickly slowly.

Timmy Timely lay on his deaf bed straining to hear as the last ticks and the last tocks ticked and tocked away.

That wasn’t much fun, he thought to himself.

Looking back from somewhere in the middle or possibly a little later, in the sure and certain hope of insurrection in the halls of temporal and spiritual lordliness if this gets published, I have to say that I am not sure that I can do it any better.

Except there is one thing that has occurred to me. Two things.

Thing one is to slow down because the finite amount you are going to achieve is what you are going to achieve anyway so you might as well cruise at whatever speed you are designed (accidentally) to do so.

Thing Two, there are more fun things to focus on, like other people’s futures, especially those who are just beginning.

Thing Three. Think Free. The best thing, as Bandler says about the past is, like this article, it’s f…king over.

Pro-Vocation

Introduction

Pro-Vocation is a new concept developed by me in response to the misalignment I see everywhere between what people want to achieve and what they are actually doing; between aspirations and ideals on the one hand, and decisions and actions on the other hand. It is both a campaign and a way of provoking thinking designed to help people in any personal or organisational context to align their actions and decisions with their authentic aspirations, values and potential.

Pro-Vocation groups are starting up in the next couple of months. To join, just contact me, Harvey Taylor at 01202 265594, e mail me at harvey@hbtuk.com, or sign up on the website at www.hbtuk.com

Details of how the groups operate are outlined after the following article on Pro-Vocation,  and also on the website www.hbtuk.com

Pro-Vocation

It has been a tough year… and I know I am not the only one who has been struggling. And you might think it strange to be reviewing the year when it is not even October but I once read a book with the subtitle, ‘The Short Twentieth Century’ so I am claiming the right to write about ‘The Long Year’.

In my case, ‘the long year’ extends from August 2008 until Sept 2009. Strange that it coincides more or less precisely with the first year of the great credit crisis.

Firstly, I would like to thank my mother for putting me in a church choir when I was 9 or 10 years old. I wasn’t overly impressed with her at the time. It didn’t do my ‘street-cred’ a lot of good. But sitting here listening to Widor’s organ toccata I remember now that the first time I ever heard it was at a wedding and I did a lot of those.

Now it makes me realise how much I love life and how inspired it is possible to be, in spite of all the challenges and setbacks we all suffer from time to time.

I would also like to thank my Father in Law for having 6 children, 13 grandchildren and 2 great grandchildren, all of whom are unremittingly wonderful human beings, especially the one I married. I’d also like to thank him for living to be 95 and for fighting off just about every major disease known to humanity. He was and still is an inspiration to me and a great role model for my kids.

Sadly my mother and my father-in-law are no longer with us, at least not in any material sense.  Between August last year when my mother died and September this year when my father-in-law died, I have had some great times and also some massive struggles. I have gone through numerous business regeneration ideas and got bored or disillusioned with most of them. I have done some of my best ever work with businesses, groups and individuals (and also one of the worst bits as well). I have started and stopped numerous projects and lost my way for weeks and even months at a time.

Positively, I also got to sit in a beach hut and listen to England winning the Ashes whilst a bunch of old gits talked about fruit cake. At the same time I watched the air show and enjoyed pretty much all of the available sunshine. I went on several brilliant courses in Leeds, culminating in a fantastic trip to Florida to complete my NLP Trainer Certification. I made dozens of new friends from literally all over the world. I watched terns diving in the sea just feet away from me in Bournemouth and I watched terns diving into the Leeds-Liverpool canal in Leeds city centre. I have seen my children grow up into even more accomplished and delightfully independent human beings.

So why is it time now to start being Pro-Vocative?

Twenty Five years ago I made a decision to play safe. I knew at the time it was the wrong thing to do, but I had just had a tough year. I had been to Nicaragua to make a film about the Sandinista revolution whilst still on my degree course. Because there was an undeclared war going on (funded by the sale of arms to Iran by none other than the USA) the college authorities were not happy about me and my two colleagues going. So we had to take a year out right in the middle of our final year. Whilst we were in Nicaragua we lost our camera and I fell down a manhole which had never been repaired after the earthquake in Managua. When we got back we fell out with each other and this held up the process of completing the film for several weeks. We were also heavily in debt. In the end we just missed getting the film on Channel Four by a few weeks.

Throughout my degree course in Creative Arts (drama and music) I had been planning to set up a theatre group. Instead I became desperate for that elusive illusory concept known as ‘security’. I wimped out and got a job in a video store and over the next few years drifted into management training.

Now, as my kids get ever closer to that time when they will have to make life defining choices, and I as I am now so much more acutely aware of my own mortality, I am struggling. The trouble is I seem to have inherited my mother’s desire to do something meaningful.

It’s a pain in the arse, frankly. I’d like to go on ‘partly living’ as T S Elliot describes it. But I can’t. It just isn’t in my nature, whatever the hell that is. I have to do ‘meaningful’ things, whatever that means. In my mother’s case it was often as simple as driving old ladies to church on Sundays, even though they were sometimes younger than she was.

So this is where Pro-Vocation comes from.

The specific style of group coaching, facilitation and learning entailed in Pro-Vocation is deliberately provocative. Drawing on the provocative therapy of Frank Farelly and Richard Bandler, the lateral thinking of Edward de Bono, the inventive weirdness of Win Wenger and the decidedly inconsistent but sometimes totally liberating field of NLP, my intention is to provoke people into leading more authentic lives, creating more authentic enterprises both in social and commercial contexts and to help people to avoid doing what I have sometimes done over the last 25 years.  That’s not to say that I have regrets. Just that I can and intend to do better.

If you are already leading the authentic life (one in which your deepest aspirations and values are constantly in view and at the heart of what you do on a daily basis) then you might not feel you need to participate, but you would be very welcome to. The more people who are already doing it, the stronger the model and inspiration will be for the rest of us.

This is not about creating some new cult of the individual. If all you want to do is have loads of money and be on TV there may be better programmes for you. This is about coming together to provoke individual and collective decision making and action to the benefit of all people. I don’t have a problem with that being commercial and profit driven, but neither do i think it has to be so.

Having had to think about what to say at the funerals of two greatly admired and deeply loved human beings over the last year I am even more conscious now of that old personal development exercise created to help discover one’s real values: imagine you are at your own funeral – now imagine hearing what you want people to be saying about you.

A few weeks ago I slept-walked into something of a public fiasco. Nobody died, and in the general scheme of things it didn’t matter that much, but it did wake me up to a few fundamental truths about who I really am and what I really want to achieve. I put it right really well and am pleased with myself for doing so, but I am also acutely conscious now that NOW is the time.

If you have ever had the sense that you are sleep walking towards your own demise and want to be shaken, provoked, teased, stimulated, antagonised, cajoled, whisked or inspired out of your somnambulations and on into a more authentic and inspired life, Pro-Vocation might just be for you.

After all, just because the ‘global economy’ seems to have gone into deficit, it doesn’t mean we have to. Credits and deficits are not real things anyway. You can’t put them in wheel barrows. They are representations of what people do and value. When I do things which I believe have real value to others I feel good and when I don’t I don’t. You have to make up your own mind.

 Anyway, if you want to burst out of your own credit crunch or just sustain and expand your own ongoing credit boom, come and be provoked. Here’s how.

Pro-Vocation Groups:

Purpose: To promote authenticity. To align aspirations, values and talent with action. To provoke the development of personally and organisationally enhancing beliefs and attitudes. To encourage commercial and social enterprise, community spirit, and individual and collective self-sufficiency and support.  To promote and foster individual and collective talent.

Approach: Groups meet once per month initially. In the first few meetings, the facilitator (known as the Agent Provocateur) provides input with linked exercises for the first hour. In the second hour, the Agent Provocateur works with issues using a provocative, facilitative and largely advice-free style to enable people to resolve challenges, exploit opportunities and talents, and to commit to action. Each session ends with an action statement from each participant focusing on an experiment they are going to conduct over the following month. Actions can be individual or collective.

Who it is for:  Some groups will set up with a specific focus (for example, ‘parenting’, or ‘personal well being’ or ‘business development’). Other groups will start out without a specific focus and will gradually develop their focus,  perhaps even splitting into separate groups once communities of interest emerge. Anyone can suggest a focus for a new group and the agent provocateur will help to set up the new group recruiting others who have similar interests. Group size limited to 15 people.

Where It Will Happen: The location for each group meeting will change from time to time. Locations will include really exceptional venues (for example, meetings may be held in cafes, a swimming pool, on a specially hired bus, in someone’s house, conference centres, on top of mountains, the beach, in a different town, or country, on a council estate, in a community centre, a garden, a boat, on a specially chartered plane, at a historic venue, and so on. Groups will agree upon the location for meetings on a rolling basis according to means, opportunity and preference. Group members will share venue organisation between themselves with support from the Agent Provocateur.

Values:

• Free and Radical Experimentation
• Robustly and Positively Provocative
• Education is best when it is Provocative
• Energy comes from Action  
• We ‘Think the Unthinkable’
• Integrity and Authenticity
• Liberating and Enabling
• Learning/Knowledge Come From Within

What it will cost: The monthly fee is £15 per person, plus your share of the venue costs. The venue cost is divided by the number of people attending. Groups will be in complete control of their venue costs and will be able to keep to whatever budget the group agrees and finds sustainable for all members of the group. Think in terms of £3-£4 to start with.  Annual subscriptions for a total of 12 sessions per year will be accepted at £144 per annum.

How You Join: Talk to Harvey NOW. Call 07974 228396 or 01202 265594. Or e mail harvey@hbtuk.com  with the heading ‘Pro-Vocation’.

The Big Bang Inflation Boom Recession Thingy

Harvey Taylor

This is not about cosmology; it just seems that way. It’s really about how you will survive and thrive in the midst of an apparent ’recession’. Trust me, I’m a hypnotherapist.

One of the most startling discoveries of the previous century is that, not only is the Milky Way not alone (there are billions, probably trillions of galaxies), but also that all galaxies, on a cosmological scale, are receding from one another at an increasing rate. Even Einstein could not quite believe this to be true when he worked out the basic elements of his General Theory of Relativity and he tried to fudge it, but in the end he admitted he was wrong. Spacetime is expanding and galaxies moving with it.

Periodically, cosmologists come up with various arguments as to why this recession of galaxies from one another may at some stage go into a recession itself (i.e. the universe will begin collapsing again) . It all comes down to how much mass and energy there is and how inflationary the inflationary epoch was. The inflationary epoch was that period of time immediately after the Big Bang when the universe inflated itself at an exponential rate. At this time the universe inflated from the size of a single proton to something the size of a grapefruit (this is equivalent to a grapefruit inflating to something the size of planet Earth). What makes the inflationary ‘epoch’ really impressive is that it only lasted for a few billionths of a billionth of a second before settling down to a more civilised rate of expansion. Without this inflationary kick none of us would be here. There would be no universe and no moustaches (see The HBT Newsletter at www.hbtuk.com for more details on the economic and cosmological significance of moustaches).

I am not going to relay what happend in the next 13.7 billion years but will just note that things could go either way now. We may continue expanding forever, we could come to a standstill, or we could start going backwards. It all comes down to how much mass and energy we have.

So far so good. None of you care anyway. None of you know whether you will be around another 13.7 billion years from now anyway, so why even think about it? Well, there is another factor which has to be taken into consideration.

Black holes. Not the kind of black holes that the US and UK governments have created which will suck in ever-increasing tax revenues for the next three generations to come, in order to bail out the banks so they can develop the confidence to invent some more imaginary money (like money is not imaginary already, we have to have imaginary-imaginary money).

I am talking about real black holes. Supermassive black holes. The kind that exist at the heart of most, if not all, galaxies. These super dense objects are so massive that they contain billions times more mass /energy than the sun and consequently have such powerful gravitational fields that not even light can escape from them.

The odd thing is that whether the universe is receding or not, black holes are undoubtedly proliferating. There is a boom going on in the black hole market. And if you follow through the solutions to Einstein’s equations, in order to make sense of black holes you have to presuppose the existence of other universes on the other side of the black holes. John Gribbin, a popular cosmologist (kind of like David Beckham but plays with bigger balls) has previously suggested that the purpose of the universe may even be to create black holes in order to spawn further universes.

Those of you that have read this week’s HBT Newsletter (did I mention? … go to www.hbtuk.com and subscribe) will also be aware that there is now some tangible evidence that another universe may be causing certain galaxies to race through space at 1000km per second all in the same direction (see also New Scientist 24 Jan 2009). It seems that in the midst of the RECESSION of galaxies we are also enjoying a BOOM in black holes.

NOWwwww…. what makes this really interesting is the way stars and black holes form. Black holes typically start out as big stars which, having exhausted the nuclear fuel available at their cores, are no longer able to generate enough radiant energy to shore themselves up against the inward tug of gravity. It’s a bit like banks. They radiate energy and spout providence for a few million years (or 63 quarters of continuous economic growth) and then collapse in a heap very suddenly and without warning. 

In order to become a star in the first place, a clump of matter (let’s say a cloud of hydrogen) has to accumulate enough material to create the kinds of pressure and heat that trigger nuclear fusion at the core of the clump. This fantastic example of perfect equilibrium (radiant energy perfectly balanced by the counter-inward pull of gravity) creates new chemical elements and, in its second and subsequent generations, can even trigger the creation of planets, life and things like us. 

When massive stars finally collapse into black holes, it now seems entirely possible that they also create new universes.

Somewhere out there, in the dark , is a portal to your next success. Without recession, inflation and black holes none of us would be here to imagine things like economic recession, price inflation and financial black holes (holes down which imaginary- imaginary money is imagined to have fallen).

It is all a question of accumulating enough matter and energy to reach critical mass. Whether you want to create a planet, a star or a whole new universe, you simply need to reach that critical point where all the experience, knowledge, skills, and most importantly of all, positive belief which you have accumulated, suddenly explodes into the next phase of what I believe to  be your infinite adventure in personal evolution. Did you know, there is enough matter in your body to create a release of energy equivalent to 30 Hiroshima sized bombs going off simultaneously?

So forget about receding. What are you going to be next?

www.hbtuk.com

harvey@hbtuk.com

Copyright ©Harvey Taylor and HBT (UK) Limited February 2009. All Rights Reserved.

Inter-City Trains of Thought – A Pro-Vocation Tour Guide

It starts with a dream. You get on this train (in your dream, or mine) and sit there happily enough, until suddenly you realise something is wrong. Apart from anything else, everyone on this train looks really miserable and of course, outside, it’s raining. The carriage smells the way old railway carriages do when they have been cleaned with a hoover that hasn’t been cleaned since before the railway carriage was built 40 years ago.

Then you realise you are going the wrong way. The train is supposed to stop at that station you just passed. The ticket collector, who looks strangely, even disturbingly familiar, assures you that the train you are on is going to a destination which you did not elect to go to. You know you got on the right train but here you are on the wrong train.

On arrival at the next station, which is  a long way away from where you thought you were going, you alight into almost total darkness. The huge grey clouds swirl above you, portentous and laden with doom. The rain scurries down your neck and as you scramble into a taxi and set off to find your office, you get a strange and familiarly tense sensation somewhere in the pit of your stomach. When you get to your office you sit at your desk and mutter darkly at people all day.

That night you fall asleep and again you dream. Is this a dream in your dream (or mine) or just another dream separate from the other dream (mine or yours)? It is of no consequence.  This time you are on the right train but once again it hurtles through the station where you are sure it is supposed to stop because you know it is the right train, but it isn’t. As it rattles across the points you look up at the signal box and there, to your considerable surprise, is the signalman smiling at you. You are convinced you have seen him somewhere before and well…  you alight in the gloom. The rain teems down your neck, there is a scramble for  the taxis and you have to wait for 20 minutes which is a trifle inconvenient because you have left your umbrella on the train.

When you finally sit at your desk you begin to snarl in a manner which deters your colleagues from approaching you.

That night in your dream within a dream you have another dream….

Now to make more sense of this you would be well advised to find an emergency window. Most modern trains are fitted with emergency windows. You pull the red handle and the window opens allowing you to escape. You can go anywhere you like. Lalaland is not a bad choice. It’s a way out when things become too much for you. I once taught a young lady on a high potential scheme how to escape through her emergency window whilst still keeping a small toehold on shared reality in case anything interesting or important happened at the meetings she had to attend. It’s amazing how you can split off nine tenths of your attention and still keep up with what is going on using only a tenth of the effort, energy and attention.

Anyway, in the interests of brevity we had better get going. Everyone likes a good holiday so given that you are all pro-vacation let’s begin our tour.

Our first leg takes us through two dramatically different cities, Specifi and Nebulo. On the face of it you can get more done in Specifi. It’s just the kind of place where you can focus, take control of your outcomes and be really precise about exactly what you want to achieve. On the other hand Nebulo is not without its own attractions. Wonderful things can emerge from all that vagueness. Just as in space, slightly denser clumps of gas and dust are at this very moment collapsing under the weight of their own gravity to form stars, so too in Nebulo City you can engender miracles. You just can’t be that sure how, where or when they will emerge. It’s all a bit nebulous frankly. Maybe you like it that way.

On we travel to Pompo and Grandio, two well known cities, especially to those of a more celebrated status. Neither of these places amount to very much. Last time I went to Pompo (or was it Grandio) I became so convinced of my own importance I ended up travelling first class. Complete waste of money really,  although there was one good thing about it which was that I found myself sitting in a railway carriage with the playwright Alan Bennett (this bit is true). When I got back, we rented his film, ‘The History Boys’, and were treated to a wonderful evening of entertainment culminating in the following exchange between a somewhat self-important teacher and slightly more down to earth sixth former,

Teacher: ‘So what is history?’

Student: ‘History, sir? As far as I can see it’s just one f***ing thing after another’.

If you spend too much time in Pompo or Grandio you are liable to start asking pompous questions. The only known antidote is to stand naked in front of a mirror until you come to your senses.

Our next destination is the twin city of Tena and Capa. If you can find your way around either 0f these treasure troves you may be richly rewarded. Intellectual capacity, however, is paltry without tenacity. Ever met someone who was really smart going nowhere? Tenacity, on the other hand, even without intellectual capacity, will get you a long way, especially if you also have some coherent goals. If you can acquire the keys to both of these city states you have got it made for life.

Further down line we come to Opa and Perspica. I am mistrustful of words beginning with the letter ‘O’. It looks too much like a zero.  The problem with Opa is that even if there was something there you just wouldn’t be able to find it. You wander around aimlessly, your senses are dulled, your spirits dampened and soon the flower of your mind begins to wilt and wither. As you stumble around in the dank and fetid air of Opa you may get lucky and come across a wet stone. Odd though it sounds, this is your route out to Perspica. Look for the wet stone. Wet stones give you a cutting  edge. Sharpen that saw. Do you remember what it is like to be incisive? Really incisive? Like this blog? Forget about cutting the atmosphere with a knife. Get yourself a saw, a wet stone and a ticket to Perspica City.

As we penetrate deeper into the hinterland we find ourselves at a strange junction. One track leads to Complexi, the other to Simpli. It’s partly a matter of personal taste. Sometimes a little challenge can be good for the soul. One day I will finish reading James Joyce’s Ulysses and who knows, maybe even find enough of it that I can understand to quote from it. But making life difficult when it could be easy without any real benefit does seems like a waste of life. There are plenty of complex problems without making up more. Maybe Einstein was right, 

‘Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex… It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction. Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.’

Beyond Simpli and Complexi we find ourselves confronted by two more cities, one green with envy, the other decidedly ‘in the pink’. These are Scar and Multipli. Never liked Scar myself. Everyone seems paranoid. People look at you as though they are expecting you to steal their grandmother. They all complain about not having enough money, although many of them seem to be living in big houses, driving big cars (in spite of the fact that there are always fuel shortages in Scar). It’s always cold too. No-one puts the heating on and the sun never seems to shine. In fact last time I was in Scar there was a rumour someone had stolen it. The sun, that is, not Scar. More’s the pity. Worst of all, there seems to be a permanent shortage of fun. People don’t sing, they don’t laugh… they don’t even have bun dances.

Now I do like a bun dance, don’t you? One thing you can be guaranteed of in Multipli is a good old fashioned bun dance. And if, as in my family, the women all burst into song every time you inadvertently let slip some casual phrase that someone once sang in a Hollywood musical some time in the last 70 years, then you can thank your lucky stars you were born into such a wonderfully wonderful world. After all, even though nothing is running out, the great thing about nothing is that there is an unlimited supply of it. Other things which are not ever likely to run out are money (governments love printing money, especially when they have spent way more than they have already printed), energy (there is enough energy in your body to generate 30 atomic bomb blasts) and now Florida based company, Petroalgae, is building a biodiesel plant in China. The algae ingests carbon dioxide straight from power stations. According to New Scientist magazine, if emissions from all the power plants in the world were harnessed for alga growing and recycled as biodiesel, CO2 emissions would drop by roughly 9 BILLION TONNES per year. There is no energy shortage.

Other things that will never run out as long as human beings inhabit the universe are love, ideas, opportunities, moustaches and recipe books. Make you own list. Who are you inviting to share in your a bun dance?

Closely linked to Scar and Multipli are the twin cities of Domesti and Auda. It’s all a question of balance. You could be blossoming in the bosom of your family or hiding beneath a bushel of turgid domesticity. Alternatively you may be boldly going where no man has gone before. The question is, is anyone following you? Vladimir Ilyich Lenin found himself in a minority of one and look at all the trouble that caused! Fortune may favour the brave, but Lenin was dead by the time he was my age and I haven’t even started revolting yet.

Unfortunately just around the bend we come upon a very unstable place. This is the city of Menda. You would think that with a name like this people would be busy fixing things up, but the more they fix things the more unstable ‘things’ become. None of the buildings have any foundations. The walls are as thin as the paper their lies are written upon.

It makes your head spin, Tony, it really does. Somewhere a cat called Campbell screeches on a hot tin roof and every nerve in this terrible place is shredded like tagliatelle in an errant pasta machine. As Aldous Huxley commented amidst the ruins of the second world war, Si monumentum, circumspectum. Al I stair at turns to dust before my eyes. The trouble is, no-one knows what is true and what isn’t anymore. It makes my head spin, Tony, it really does. Still, Europe, eh? Tomorrow the World. Maybe even an office at the Vatican? You could wear a frock and one of those hats shaped like a pen.Is….is this some kind of personal vendetta, Harvey?

Fortunately, Vera is at hand. Vera is not the most exciting place on the planet, but you know where you are with Vera. Everything is as it seems. The place is as old fashioned as the name, but if you want to be sure of something, Vera is the place to be.

Now, a few miles beyond the environs of Menda and Vera we come upon a truly intriguing city all on its own. This is the city of Automati. Everything here runs like clockwork. Not everything is that great. On the other hand, it is kind of predictable. People seem to follow well worn paths day after day. Rumour has it that the city was originally built by turkeys. The turkeys were a bit limited. They knew how to nurture turkey chicks when they went ’cheep, cheep’ and they knew what a polecat looked like and how to attack one if it strayed into the city limits. But then one day a cruel logger (some say he was a psycho logger) put a radio transmitter into a polecat and the turkeys found themselves nurturing their natural enemy while their natural enemy eat all the chicks. These days, Automati is inhabited by humans. The turkeys have all gone.

You’d think things would have improved. After all, humans are so much better at learning than turkeys. The problem is, humans seem to simply learn millions even billions of automatic patterns as opposed to the one or two the turkeys were born with. Some of these automatic patterns are very positive and serve the human inhabitants of Automati City well. But there are many other patterns which in spite of their automatic quality, seem only to make humans miserable. Most of the priests and priestesses in Automaticity wear their habits with pride. And you could go a long way before you find a priest who has Nun.

This leads us inevitably to Toxi and Neurotoxi. These places are seriously polluted. It never ceases to amaze me that people will stay somewhere which is slowly poisoning them. People don’t mean to be toxic anymore than organisations do. It’s just that what one organism finds tolerable, even beneficent, will kill another. Basically you have limited choices in these cities. Clean up or get out.

Even more incomprehensibly, some people actually poison themselves. If it was just with narcotics, tobacco and booze I could understand. Many of us have been there. But some of these people are poisoning their neurology with toxic ideas. You know the kind of thing…when I am rich I will be happy. When he/she falls under a bus I will be happy. When I am President of Europe I will be taken seriously again.  That kind of stuff.

As we near the end of this epic intercity tour, we cruise through Elasti and Plasti, those delightful cities where everyone adapts according to your needs. Nothing is too much trouble here. There is always a way. All you need is a little flexibility in that attitude and everything will come right in the end. Such a relief after some of the places we have been and a great prelude to the climax of our trip.

For now we are about to enter the city of Authenti.

Hush. Listen. At the heart of this city (some say the soul) there is a stunningly peaceful silence. If you go quiet on the inside you might even hear that still, quiet inner voice Ghandi talks about. The voice of the real you. The person you love to be.

It is possible to spend more time here than is necessarily good for business. Too much autheticity overwhelms most people. ‘Living and partly living’. But then I never was that worldly. Like my mum, really. It’s her birthday today, 13 October 2009. She would have been 89. Happy Birthday, Mum, wherever you are now.

Pro-Vocation Tour Guides are published by Harvey Taylor and HBT (UK) Ltd and are strictly (c) copyright. All rights reserved. If you would like to attend a Pro-Vocation group, you can find out more and sign up on the website at www.hbtuk.com

Stress, Anxiety and Custard

You may not yet have seen the front page article and subsequent comment on page 20 of todays Daily Telegraph (14 April 2009). According to the Mental Health Foundation, people in the UK are now more prone to anxiety than ever before. Government figures show that last year 800,000 more people suffered from anxiety disorders than in 1993 giving a total of over 7 million for the UK.

The MHF are saying that government and the media are partially responsible for this dramatic rise in anxiety because of the bad news they keep giving out.

 

If you are one of the anxious, relax. This blog posting will help. You may need to bite your tongue for a few minutes whilst you work through it, but rest assured, you can relax about everything I am about to say because this is the answer to all your ‘problems’.

 

You may also need some custard powder, a large pudding basin and lots of milk.

 

First of all, just because the government and the media make up bad stories and/or focus their attention on the possible bad consequences of global warming, the credit crunch or eating garbage, it doesn’t mean the rest of us have to. You get what you focus on. I’m not saying stick your head in the sand (although if this works for you, do it anyway!) I am just saying that when we focus on the way we want things to be, we can at least begin to move in that direction.

 

Tomorrow is the 20th anniversary of the Hillsborough stadium disaster, in which 96 football fans were crushed to death. The media will play the images over and over again on TV throughout the day. This is a bad thing to do and I will not be watching. I fully support the notion that we remember those that are no longer here and that we focus on what we have learnt and what good we have made from this tragedy (football stadiums in this country are now amongst the safest in the world). And I personally like to remember people who have been close to me and who are now dead in terms of their happiest and most positive moments and characteristics. But playing old movies of bad things happening is not generally likely to generate good feelings, and unless there is still something useful we can prompt ourselves into doing by generating the bad feelings, why generate them at all?

 

Let’s deal with the slightly controversial bit first. I tend to agree with Melanie McDonagh of the Telegraph when she suggests that the answer to worry is to get busy. She cites Dr Johnson,

‘Employment is the great instrument of intellectual domination… the gloomy and resentful are always found among those who have nothing to do.’

 

Now you may well exclaim, aha! It is because I am one of the estimated 3 million who will be ‘unemployed’ in this country by next year (according to the government and the media), but RELAX; I do not think Dr Johnson was using the term unemployment in the salaried and waged sense, but more in the sense that the devil makes work for idle hands, or more specifically, for idle minds.

 

By employing your mind in a useful direction on a regular basis (like how to generate the level of income you want to generate), you can stay healthy and sane.

 

Here are some simple statements about the reality of anxiety. These are not ‘facts’ because there are few if any ‘facts’ when it comes to such a subjective experience as an emotion; just opinions. These statements are followed by some simple suggestions. By the way, in case you are wondering about my qualification to pontificate upon these matters, I am a clinical hypnotherapist and an NLP Master Practitioner and Trainer (that’s neuro linguistic programming). I am also trained in cognitive behavioural hypnotherapy.

Things worth knowing about anxiety

 

 

·         ‘Anxiety’ is a normal healthy negative emotion, providing you do not overuse it.

·         If you could completely get rid of all anxiety you would almost certainly get knocked down by a car or fall off something high up.

·         Anxiety is a key component of your Earth survival kit and without it you would die.

·         If you overuse anxiety for a long time, your brain may react by withdrawing from the whole experience of emotion and you could be left with that flat sense of not feeling anything at all (i.e. what some people call being depressed). If you have reached that stage, see a doctor AND insist on seeing a cognitive behavioural therapist and/or an NLP practitioner as well.

·         If some bad things have happened then it is natural to feel sad. For instance my mother died last year I was very upset and occasionally I have had thoughts about my own inevitable demise. When I think about the fact that one day I too will die, I naturally feel a little anxious. I am sad that my mother is no longer here. This is normal.

·         If I focus on her not being here then I will exacerbate the sadness.

·         If I practice thinking about dying every day for the rest of my life, I will get very good at generating very high levels of anxiety.

·         If I focus on all the wonderful things I learnt from my mother, then I feel grateful that she was my mother and happy that she made such positive use of her life.

·         If I think about what I am usefully going to do today, then I feel calm and motivated.

·         There is no such thing as a ‘stressful’ situation or event or person.

·         If you put one hundred people into any given situation, each would respond differently. Some would get anxious, some would be a little concerned and some would not give a toss.

·         It cannot, therefore, be the situation that generates the ‘stress’ (i.e. anxiety), but something about what we imagine these situations mean or imply and how we do this.

·         Anxiety is a just word which describes a unique process in each unique human being on the planet. How you feel when you say you are anxious or stressed is different to how I feel when I say I am anxious or stressed. One person feels a knotted up sensation in their stomach. Another person feels tense across their shoulders. The first person generates the knots in his stomach by making a movie in his mind about getting made redundant. The second person generates the tension in her shoulders by imagining being laughed at by her colleagues as she makes a speech.

·         Your unconscious mind does not distinguish between what is really happening and what you imagine is happening. If you imagine bad things you will generate bad feelings.

·         The more vividly you imagine something, the stronger the associated feelings become.

·         You can attach anxiety to anything.  There are people who are frightened of buttons (some helpful psychologist even made up a name for this ‘disease’; koumpounophobia)

·         If you can attach anxiety to a button, you can attach calmness, or rampant motivation, or lust, or happiness to a button.

·         I know someone who is terrified of hippos. Being fearful of hippos is a good idea, if you live in Africa because they kill more people than any other animal.

·         This woman lives in Wiltshire. Hippos are not an indigenous to Wiltshire. But if you work hard and practice imagining being killed by a hippo, even though you live thousands of miles from the nearest wild hippo, you can make it so that even a cuddly toy hippo triggers a panic attack.

·         In my experience, as a therapist, people are not anxious twenty four hours a day. They wax and wane. Consequently it is worth focusing on what is different when you are less anxious. What are you doing (in your imagination) that is different when you are less anxious, to what you do in your imagination to generate more anxiety?

·         How do you calm yourself even when the situation itself has not yet changed (because you do calm yourself, just as you can disturb yourself)?

·         Taking excessive drugs (prescribed or otherwise), alcohol, nicotine, chocolate or any other substance, or engaging in any potentially self-destructive activity to ward off unpleasant, but normal human emotions will almost invariably make things worse over the long term. This is because you are teaching your brain’s natural defences against excessive anxiety to become lazy or give up altogether.

·         If you are on prescription drugs, or drinking a lot of alcohol, do NOT stop suddenly but seek advice from your doctor/therapist on how to manage your feelings, and on how to wean yourself off the drugs/alcohol safely.

·         Anti-anxiety drugs (anxyolitics) carry a significant risk of dependency and are not designed for long term usage (but you must consult your doctor before attempting to stop).

·         Overcoming anxiety can actually be fun and can also be very quick with the right kind of help.

·         An anxiety attack (or panic attack) is something you generate by developing anxiety about anxiety. So now you know this, you could start to worry about whether you have become anxious about getting anxious about anxiety and that will help you to generate an anxiety attack even more quickly!

·         OK, now I am taking the Mickey. I find this is one of the most effective ways of helping people with so-called ‘anxiety disorders’ – to take the Mickey out of them and get them laughing at themselves.

·         That and finding them something more useful to do with their imaginations.

 

 

Some simple suggestions for managing anxiety healthily:

 

·         When seeking medical advice beware of doom and gloom statements. For example, my clients have variously been told the following by well meaning doctors,

 

‘You’ll have to take this for the rest of your life’.  ‘It’s a long slow process’. ‘It’s just the way things are’.

 

·         None of these statements are statements of fact. Each of these statements is liable to keep you stuck because they do not provide any solution or hope. Each of these statements is just a ‘story’ made up by a well meaning doctor or therapist. No-one can predict the future, not even a doctor; not even a doctor in a white coat, with a stethoscope

 

·         Whenever anyone tells you what a bad state you are in, argue with them, whether you feel like it or not, just as a matter of principle.

 

·         Adopt beliefs about yourself and the way things are going to be that are useful to you; not because they are true or untrue, but because they are a basis for hope.

 

·         You life is your story and you are the one writing the story, so stop writing a horror movie script or a tense thriller and start writing a feel-good movie or a chick flick.

 

·         De-pathologise your language. The definitions of ‘mental illnesses’ are largely arbitrary.  These definitions have become more widely encompassing over the last few decades. This is a major contribution to the ridiculous numbers cited in the Daily Telegraph today.

·         Tell yourself you are not an anxious person and that you do not suffer from anxiety.

 

·         Reframe your experience of anxiety thus: ‘Sometimes, in the past, I have made myself feel bad by dwelling on things which generate anxious feelings in my body and because I did this for a while I became really good at generating these unpleasant sensations and making them persist. BUT NOW, I am practising dwelling on what might go well and how things might turn out better than I expected and whether they do or they don’t I know that I can feel calm just by focusing on calm pictures and sounds in my imagination. I can still experience enough concern to avoid taking stupid risks, but no more than this.’

 

·         Yes it was you that was making yourself anxious. No, it wasn’t your fault! You are a human being. It’s what we do to keep safe, just like eating is what we do to feel energised. But in both cases we can overdo it and get the opposite result to what we planned.

 

Practice any or all of the following:

 

·         Pattern interrupts. A pattern interrupt is anything you do (in your mind or in physical reality) which interrupts the pattern of your anxiety provoking thoughts.

 

·         Lie on the floor and shout ‘ants!’ whilst waving your arms and legs in the air.

·         Turn round and face your anxiety engendering movies and/or voices and thrust your hand forwards into their face whilst simultaneously shouting STOP. You can do this with real people who are encouraging you to think about bad things as well. I love doing it to highly qualified people who are telling me why I am ‘going to feel bad’ for a long time.

·         When your imaginary movies and voices are too busy generating anxiety to notice what you are up to, make a huge bowl of cold lumpy custard and spring out from behind an arras (a kind of Shakespearian curtain) and tip the whole bowl of custard onto the movie and/or the voice.

·         Make up your own pattern interrupts. The sillier they are, the better, because it is hard to stay anxious when you are falling about laughing.

 

·         Learn how to anchor positive feelings. You can find out how to do this on my website www.hbtuk.com or you can buy a good book such as Richard Bandler’s Get The Life You Want, Paul McKenna’s Change Your Life in Seven Days, and Michael Neill’s Feel Happy Now.

 

·         Scrub the floor, clean the toilet, and wash the car (wash someone else’s car if you don’t have your own). If you make something gleam it feeds back to you and you will start to gleam too.

 

·         Sack your therapist unless they can offer you ways of feeling good right now.

·         Especially sack your therapist if they keep asking you about your childhood and focusing you back on bad moments in your life.

·         If necessary take duct tape to your therapy sessions and gag your therapist every time they even so much as mention the past.

·         Remember, the past is over.

 

·         Book a session with a hypnotherapist, not necessarily a qualified one, but one who is really good – you can tell whether they are any good by asking other people who have been to see them and by whether you feel better in your first session or not. If you feel worse, ask for your money back.

 

Remember the words of Wayne Dyer. If you think about the things you cannot control there is no sense in worrying about them because you cannot control them.

 

If you think about the things you can control there is no sense in worrying about them because you can control them.  So…  if there is no sense in worrying about the things you cannot control because you cannot control them, and there is no sense in worrying about the things you can control because you can control them, then what is there left to worry about?

 

Copyright ©Harvey Taylor and HBT (UK) Limited April 2009. All Rights Reserved.

The Custard Hypnotherapy Controversy Continues

Yes, I know. There is more to life than custard and just because someone threw green custard at Lord Mandelson (and had the temerity to do so whilst I was in the US learning how to utilise metaphors and was consequently oblivious to the fact) it doesn’t mean that the whole custard/hypnotherapy debate is really beginning to take off, although when it does, remember where you heard about it first (see previous posting on this topic).

Some people (who have not yet had the courage to commit their views to the public domain), have told me that I am not taking therapy seriously because someone who is serious about helping people to improve their lives and overcome life difficulties, business challenges or even serious mental illness would not behave in such an immature and frivolous manner. Whereas my first approach to anyone who is suffering seriously is to tell them to stop suffering it and take it less seriously.

Because they haven’t tasted my custard and neither have you so far, so good. Neither have they understood the full range of possibilities. The only way to achieve such a level of understanding is to sign up for some custard hypnosis. 

Right now, in my last blog posting on this subject I merely skimmed the skin of the therapeutic potential of custard. Oh, and buy the way, it can be quite financially viable when you consider all the benefits right now with all this fantasising about  ’so-called’ economic meltdown because before you sign up for more of this, do remember I am a hypnotherapist and that at some level this is making sense, albeit possibly not consciously.

 Better now?

Ok, let’s go into the custard in more depth.

The fact is there is a well established link between custard and that well known neurotransmitter, serotonin. This is not the kind of causal link which neurologists are so fond of, but more of a casual association which once you have already accepted this association(and you will remember I am a hypnotherapist won’t you) will make you smile or possibly even laugh so much that the custard begins to leak from your mind in a reassuringly pleasant manner leaving you with a deep sense of well being and bonhomie. You can visit the custard well of being which is currently masquerading as my website at www.hbtuk.com for more information.

Now, by this point,  if you had had a bakewell tart and custard and someone had told you a great joke…think of the funniest joke you ever heard…and then you were to become aware of the fact that custard therapy works best in your swimming costume (or even in someone else’s) you begin to make more sense of this in a way (the by-ways and higways of your conscious and/or unconscious mind notwithstanding) which will take you effortlessly and comfortably all the way into a new way of thinking and feeling.

I mean. Imagine.

There was my client, in tears, telling me about yet another person who had died (I think some people go out looking for people they met once and then have them die on them at inopportune moments), and other people, seriously are just so unlucky (and there’s a BIG clue – the more serious you are the more unlucky you become) and I decided to pull the custard stunt when they were already in Bye Bye land (this is a metaphor for four or five different levels of hypnotic trance although it isn’t the level of trance you find yourself slipping into for now that matters so much as your ability to slip easily and comfortably into the deep well being of custard).

The Custard Stunt:

1. Prepare a bowl of custard well in advance. This is important because the custard must be at or below room temperature (but don’t go to extremes, i.e. avoid anything approaching absolute zero, especially if you are in the banking on business at some stage in the near futures market).
2. Have your client (i.e. someone who wants to feel better about something) describe how their issues (clients always have ‘issues’ and therapists always have ’tissues’) are related to the bowl of tepid custard before them.
3. Persist. Some of my clients become offended. Others are up-ended and a few become distended (only the ones who eat the custard too quickly). I have even smothered a few clients with the custard stunt, but that was just a slip up.
4. Here are some of the infinite ways in which you can keep reframing the questions until they begin to make more sense (i.e stop taking things so seriously and realise it is all about having more fun) -
5. If your relationship was a bowl of custard what would you have to do with the custard to relate to your partner in a more positive and life enhancing manner for both of you.
6. Buy the way, it’s not necessary to use question marks or even the usual interrogative inflection in your voice when asking such questions. In fact I like to go all the way down into the depths of the custard to find a more appropriate  and authoritative tone (get it now?).
7. If your life was not only NOT a bowl of cherries, but is in fact a bowl of custard, similar to, or different from the bowl of custard you see before you now, how is your life going to get better, isn’t it. Because isn’t it less about the bowl and more about what you put in it that determines how much better you are beginning to feel now.
8. Or my favourite custard question of all…. How much do  you really imagine this bowl of custard cares about you and what that could really mean to you if you just let it pass you by straight into your unconscious mind right now.

OK, that’s enough for now. I am not giving anymore FREE stuff away because you can make your own custard and you can invest as massively in your future as you have in mine because every penny is worth it to take control of your life and just feel good for no reason other than the fact that you are thinking about then possible connections between custard and every solution to every challenge you have ever had and every opportunity you want to exploit this.

It really is time to say Bye Bye NOW. Just as an experiment, you know? This isn’t really going to work isn’t it.

Until next time.

Love and Custard, Harvey Taylor

www.hbtuk.com

harvey@hbtuk.com

Copyright ©Harvey Taylor and HBT (UK) Limited April 2009. All Rights Reserved.

Can You Use Custard as an Alternative to Hypnotherapy to Facilitate Personal Change?

The simple answer is, ‘yes’.  You can use anything to facilitate anything else. For example, if I want to facilitate the free flow of traffic to my management training and hypnotherapy website www.hbtuk.com I could write a blog about the use of custard as an alternative to hypnosis or hypnotherapy in the field of personal change. It might not make much sense but then few things do. Many people have reservations about hypnotherapy anyway.  How is custard so very different?

Many of us make important decisions on the basis of far less obvious causality. The inimitable Win Wenger, himself a qualified hypnotherapist, who disavows hypnosis (see ‘The Einstein Factor’), refers to this process of making deliberately random associations as ‘force fitting’. By posing the above question, I now have to find an answer. In the process I may well learn something new.

Here are three possible applications for custard as an alternatives to hypnotherapy in personal change work:

1. Fill your bath with custard at an ambient temperature and immerse yourself. This procedure will help you to put all other aspects of your life into a new perspective. You can have a hypnotherapy CD at your side to enhance the experience if you really want to but this may mean any positive affect is difficult to attribute. Was it the custard or the hypnotherapy?
2. Imagine your primary obstacle to success is like the custard on top of a 1970’s trifle. Fight your way through the custard with a dessert spoon to the sherry soaked sponge wherein you may reasonably expect to find the answer to your dreams. Do this in a state of enhanced hypnosis may speed up the process but again, which was the active element, the custard or the hypnotherapy?
3. Attach the smell of freshly mixed, hot custard, in your imagination, to a situation or person which may previously have triggered unwelcome thoughts, feelings or responses . This is not so much hypnotherapy as aromatherapy

Simple isn’t it? You can enhance any of the above by inducing a deep hypnotic trance and installing appropriate post-hypnotic suggestions such as, ‘…and as you continue to relax, at some level, your unconscious mind understands what this means and knows exactly what to do to make the appropriate, life enhancing adjustments which will allow you to achieve everything … etc. etc.’ If you have a view on the hypnotherapy/custard controversy, post your comments now and I’ll be sure to get back to you.

www.hbtuk.com

harvey@hbtuk.com

Copyright ©Harvey Taylor and HBT (UK) Limited February 2009. All Rights Reserved.