I’ve been reading the Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle again and I’m able to notice negative thoughts a lot better recently. These aren’t big negative beliefs rather little agitated or irritated pieces of inner dialogue; ‘Why are those people always like that?’, ‘Why does this always happen?’ So short they’ve usually passed by before I’ve had a chance to notice them. I guess once you’ve noticed the big issues and worked with them it’s time to notice the smaller things and mop them up as well.

Eckhart suggests that you only need to acknowledge the negative thought in order to reduce its power. But I’ve be experimenting with tapping them and the deeper issues behind them. I see them as symptoms of underlying issues.

One of the important skills to learn is this ability to notice negative thought patterns, beliefs and emotions. It’s part of what Magnus calls emotional literacy. It can be challenging because you’ll often hide the things you need to work on from yourself. That’s why most EFT’ers ought to work with fellow tappers to uncover issues lurking in their blind spots. In the mean time emotional literacy can be cultivated by being present in your body as Eckhart describes.

Applying the principles of the Power of Now together with EFT seems to work really well and I recommend you all try it.

Ever feel like your thinking is going round in circles and you’re not really generating any new ideas? If you can’t even think of new ways of behaving how will you ever do things differently?

Here’s a quick exercise you can do when faced with situations where you need to generate new possibilities and think outside the box.

You take a problem statement, your outcome or a difficult situation and apply these four algorithms that play with the possibilities open to you. It’s best explained by giving examples.

Outcome: I want to give presentations with confidence.

Question: What would it be like if you did give presentations with confidence? (+/+)

Answers (Courses of action, useful states, new ideas, towards motivation): I would feel happy, proud, like I’ve achieved something, I’ll be able to do better at work, progress in my career more quickly.

Question: What wouldn’t it be like if you did give presentations with confidence? (-/+)

Answers (Away from motivation): I would not feel like I’m living up to my potential, I would not feel nervous before presentations.

Question: What would it be like if you didn’t give presentations with confidence? (+/-)

Answers: I would feel sad, uninspired, feel like I’m not progressing.

Question: What wouldn’t it be like if you didn’t give presentations with confidence? (-/-)

Answers: I would feel really good about myself, feel confident and in control, know what I have to do to progress.

The questions may seem a bit confusing so read them slowly. I find that they are helpful for putting me in that zen / no-mind state which is a really good creative state to be in. The last question especially makes me a bit dizzy!

You can apply the algorithms to a lot of things. Say you’re brainstorming around some ideas, you could ask: ‘What would we do if we were to build a new website to market this product?’ Or: ‘What would we do if we didn’t build a new website?’

I remember being told about the Knowledge Economy in school and that the resources for this economy consist of Data, Knowledge and Information (which I’ll call ‘content’ from now on).

• Data consists of raw symbols that are devoid of meaning.
• Information is what you get when you start to give meaning to the data and the relationships between them.
• Knowledge is the collection of information intended to be useful for a specific purpose.

I realised that there is probably at least another level on top of this and decided to call it wisdom. This is where you have data, information and knowledge and you know what do with it in order to achieve your goal. Wisdom is the ability to interpret content in original ways and separate the useful stuff from the rest. It also allows for someone to question the paradigm in which the content was created and decide whether or not these serve the intended purpose. You can then change the paradigm or look to other paradigms for different perspectives.Sadly for me it turns out I’m not the first one to come up with this idea. A quick search revealed:

Data, Information, Knowledge and Wisdom

and

Knowledge economy becomes global

Anyway, the high quality problem we’ve created for ourselves is information overload. Too much data, information and knowledge that we are having trouble sifting through.

I think this is where wisdom comes in. It filters what’s useful from what isn’t and presents us with the right course of action to take with the content we have at our disposal. In the business world this role has been filled by consultants whom you pay for advice on a course of action.

Thanks to the internet we have access to consultants and experts on every conceivable subject and we can get a lot of information for free. This is the domain of the blogger who dispenses advice and expertise on their niche subject. The other example of wisdom in action on the internet is the rise of social bookmarking and new aggregation sites such as Digg and Stumble Upon. This is the wisdom of crowds in action, bringing to surface the content it’s users think others will benefit from.

Now I know there are flaws with both of these examples. How do you know that the self-proclaimed expert really is what they say they are? And don’t social bookmarking sites tend to promote content that appeals to the lowest common denominator? Valid concerns of course, but nothing solutions can’t be found for. And at the very least people tend to vote with their feet. If one person or site doesn’t seem to have the necessary wisdom to help users then they’ll find someone or somewhere that does.

I think the Wisdom Economy consists of people adding value to content with their wisdom and being paid for it by clients wanting to save time and money. This will happen either directly through fees or indirectly through advertising.

Although hypnosis and trance have been in use for thousands of years, it still suffers from many misconceptions and misunderstandings that shroud it in mystery for the average person. But slowly mainstream science is starting to investigate it more thoroughly and you can read about the latest research at Mind Hacks

The editorial of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute discusses a recent study that found that hypnosis can be successfully used in breast cancer surgery to reduce pain, nausea, painkiller use, tiredness and emotional impact of the surgical procedure.

I’m still incredibly fascinated by the fact that someone speaking to you in a certain way can affect your mind by literally changing where blood flows to in your brain.

To be honest, on my more paranoid days I wonder if certain groups of people have been using hypnosis on an unsuspecting public for a while. Just listen to the ‘unspeak’ of politicians or the mesmerising phrases used in advertising. Maybe they just spread a meme that ridiculed the idea to keep people from taking it too seriously?

If you want to learn this powerful skill (drug-free pain control / powerful sales techniques / protection from unwanted influence / engaging copy-writing) then I suggest you check out probably the best course by the best Hypnotist around:

Igor Ledochowski’s Conversational Hypnosis

The term memetic engineering was developed by Leveious Rolando, John Sokol and Gibran Burchett who were researching and observing the behaviour of humans after they were exposed to to certain memes. Memetic engineering is the analysis of an individual or individual’s behavior, the selection of specific memes and the distribution or propagation of those memes with the intent of altering the behavior of others.

Although it’s difficult to predict which memes will take off, it’s certainly possible to follow guidelines and rules to craft your message so that it is as ’sticky’ and ‘contagious’ as it can possibly be.

A good example of memetic engineering is described in this article: Meme, Counter-meme. It describes how Mike Godwin created a maxim in order to counter unproductive discussions on internet forums.

If you are on FaceBook you can join the new Meme Weaver group I’ve created. Then you’ll be able to meet other Meme Weaver readers and share your own ideas, thoughts, videos and articles.

If the above link doesn’t work just type Meme Weaver into the FaceBook search engine.

Admit it, EFT is weird. Tapping on your face to get rid of negative emotions, come on!

Even though I’ve been using EFT for a couple of years I still think it’s a bit strange. But the difference between myself and people that like to pretend that they ‘think outside of the box’ is that I really do. And I don’t let any preconceptions from myself or others stop me from exploring new ideas. At the end of the day I’ll do what works and I have no fear of having my map of reality questioned because I’m comfortable holding different and contradictory ideas and concepts in my mind at the same time.

Now I was first shown EFT three years ago and I remember using it on anxiousness around certain social situations. My anxiousness disappeared straight and I found myself taking action before I even realised what I was doing. But after that I only used it intermittently over the next few years. I didn’t realise just how widely it can be applied. You can literally tap everything including your beliefs about EFT itself.

• ‘Even though EFT isn’t scientific…’

• ‘Even though EFT is weird…’

• ‘Even though EFT is weird hippy-shit…’

• ‘Even though EFT is New-Age nonsense…’

• ‘Even though tapping on my face is completely ridiculous…’

• ‘Even though EFT will never work for me…’

You get the idea.

The skill you’re employing here is a very useful. Being able to observe your own beliefs, thoughts and emotions is called metacognition and it’s something not many people do.

More mainstream attention for EFT. Not everyone is convinced that it works because of ‘energy’. Still good to see the exposure.

Rebecca Lamy looked out of her window on to a garden covered with gravel. No grass. Not one flower. Strangely, this barren outlook calmed her. Nothing to attract wasps. Even the thought of the black and yellow insects made her heart thud. “I’d never been stung, but was terrified that I might be. I had visions of suffering some terrible allergic reaction,” explains Lamy, 27, a training manager for Marks & Spencer, from Jersey. A friend recommended emotional freedom technique (EFT) which, like acupuncture, is based on the idea that energy flows around the body along 14 meridian lines. Sometimes, according to the theory, these pathways get blocked by negative emotion, causing anxiety, phobias, even physical illness.

Read the rest at the Times: Tap away the Trauma.

It also reminded me to put a link up to this older article about EFT being used my Medical Doctors on Iraq-War Veterans. Unorthodox therapy gains local following.

And of course try out some EFT using free videos at Tapping.com

I had been interested in NLP and Hypnosis for a few years when my friend Magnus invited me to go on a two day Mentalism course by Igor Ledochowski. (Mentalism is the blend of Psychology and magic that performers like Derren Brown and David Blaine practice). Although I have only a passing interest in practising magic I know that many effects make use of the way human psychology works and that’s what interested me most. So we drove down to London for the weekend to see if there was anything for us to learn.

Now Igor is amongst other things an NLP Practitioner and Hypnotherapist and it turned out that some of what he would be teaching would involve using some of the skills from these disciplines. I felt quite a lot anticipation when I sat down in the room with 40 or so other people because I had heard that Igor was good at putting people into deep trances. Well it turns out he is phenomenal at it.

He started off by telling us a story about how Milton Erickson discovered his particular method of hypnosis.. But this wasn’t an ordinary story. Because as I was sitting there, listening to the words, allowing them to run through my mind, I started to feel my arms getting heavy. This feeling started to creep around my body and I found my attention completely transfixed on Igor. I was going into trance and so where the other 39 people in the room. I couldn’t believe what was happening and fought to regain control over my body. But the only part that I could still move was my left big toe, everything else felt warm and good. Yet I couldn’t move a muscle. Out of the corner of my eyes I even saw people’s heads drop towards their chests as they nodded off, and all he was doing was telling us a story about how some other guy discovered how to put people into trance.

That was the first time I had really experienced deep trance and it was one of my first ‘Seeing the Matrix’ moments. When you have an experience like that it makes you realise the power of the mind and how little most people know about it. I wonder why hypnosis still has such a pseudo-scientific image as it’s obviously very powerful and is being used increasingly in the context of mainstream medicine for things like pain control. If I were paranoid I’d think that the powers that be don’t want us to have these kinds of skills and knowledge.

So what where the three things I learned?

1. Go into the state you want to induce in others.

People naturally follow each other into various states; energetic, relaxed etc. So if you want other people around you to start feeling relaxed and at ease you have to feel that way yourself first. Once you do that you’ll find that your voice and body language will reflect this and the people around you will start to feel the same.

2. Pace and Lead.

Hypnotism is nothing more than leading someone through different states, and in order to do that you need to first describe what the other person is experiencing in that moment. For example: ‘You are sitting, reading this sentence, saying the words in your mind’.

Then you lead them into a new thought or feeling; ‘and as you’re sitting there reading this sentence your mind might wander off and start to think about in what ways learning this skill could be useful’.

3. The hypnotic state is something you do to yourself.

This literally blew my mind, though now it seems obvious. A hypnotist isn’t sending out magical brain-waves to put other people into trance. They only help us find that state within ourselves. We are the ones that are creating the bodily sensations and thoughts. That’s why the more you trance you experience the better you get at it.

Remember those people that were nodding off during Igor’s story? Those were actually the people that have been practising hypnosis the most. They’ve built up the skill that allows them to go in to trance very quickly.

Those three points raise many interesting questions. First and foremost: Are people putting themselves in and out of trance all the time naturally? What do you guys think?

Anyway, if you want to find out more about Igor Ledochowski and how you can learn these ‘Jedi-level skills’ yourself, check out his site: Conversational Hypnosis.