As I run training courses both in therapy and business communication skills all around the UK and Europe, I meet a lot of new people. And that’s a lot of curious people from a complete range of different backgrounds.

One aspect of my work that I really wanted to get across on my Website was the question I’m most frequently asked.

‘What happens in a Cognitive Hypnotherapy session?’

I’m not sure I’ve ever managed to explain it sufficently no matter how many years and edits the website can go through.

Sure, I could outline the basic format. We start with a conversation about what you’d like to change or improve in your life. Then, we’ll work through a therapeutic exercise together and the session will usually finish with some relaxation work.

This seems so vague though – and that’s the challenge. As the sessions are bespoke for the individual who comes to see me, no two sessions are the same.

There’s often overlaps – there’s certainly patterns and behaviours that some people repeat where i’ve seen many similar before. Yet, no matter how many clients I see and work with – there is always something new. And that’s what makes us so wonderful as human beings.
We don’t fit into a manual or a textbook. There isn’t a magic formula – it’s only through a process of engagement that is two ways that your life can really change.

I frequently get phone calls/emails ‘My friend came to see you and you did X and Y, will we do the same thing?’ And the most honest, congruent answer I can give is ‘I don’t know.’

It’s not until we’re in the therapy office, having a conversation in which you outline what you’d like to change and how you’d like it to be different – that I’ll be able to determine the best course of action that will help.

There’s not one magic formula for working with people with confidence issues or low self esteem, every phobia is different. Our anxiety or depressions are unique to us and we all cope with stress in different ways.

Cognitive Hypnotherapy takes the best elements of different therapies such as CBT, NLP, Pyschotherapy, Jungian Theory, Gestalt work and I find the right combination to get the most effective results at the fastest rate possible for you.

I believe strongly in a dialogue during our time together – to find out how you’re finding the experience both in and out of the therapy/coaching room during our work together.

So I’m still not there in explaining it quite as succinctly as I’d like – but I think we know why. It’s very much something that talking about can be limiting, but actually for the benefits – it’s there to be experienced.

Zack Polanski is a Cognitive Hypnotherapist and NLP Trainer working at 1 Harley Street, London. He works with a variety of issues ranging from building confidence to low self esteem.Dea ling with stress and anxiety, phobic reactions and performance improvement.
To find out more about his unique mix of formal therapy, a conversational style and hypnosis – please call on 07738088632 or email at info@zackpolanski.com

The Master and his Emissary by Ian Mcgilhurst.

To any therapist – I would suggest this book will vastly enhance the way that you work. I frequently get emails asking for suggestions, and for the forseeable future, I shall point people in this direction.

I do have a caveat here – that the book is heavy. It’s certainly not light reading and will require absolute engagement. When the lightbulbs do start to flicker though and jigsaw pieces fall into place, to mix metaphors, it really is a wonderful moment.

The basic premise of the book is about the hemispheric differences in our brain and how these are represented in society. Simplistically, in this blog, the left hemisphere representing logic, reason, specificity and more recently – our business/commerical brain.

The right hemisphere representing creativity, wholeness and an entry point into the wider world. The artistic brain.

Traditionally, there was a balance between the two hemispheres – with information entering through the right, being assessed by the left and returning to the right for consideration. This, the book argues, is the healthiest way in which our mind/brain can work and is conducive to a balanced existence.

Over the past hundred years, mainly since the industrial revolution, the left side of the brain has gradually crept up and placed it’s influence on our thinking. This has resulted in short sightnedness, unfettered individualism and a rise in selfish greed. The book goes on to wax lyrical about political philosophy and tracks the differences in our ‘culture’ through the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the Reformation – tying in with neuroscience and the different implications this can have in how we percieve our world.

For the therapist, frequently when we work with issues whether it be phobias, lack of confidence or self esteem, depression or anxiety – more often than not, the underlying problem is that of hemispheric dissonance (or in other terms, a misalignment between the conscious and the unconscious mind) – although the book is not targeted at therapists, it’s clear where the dots can be connected and the future of our industry can be percieved to outline where we would like to go next.

If anyone would like to discuss any areas of the book with me, I’m always more than happy to recieve correspondence – on info@Zackpolanski.com

Zack Polanski is a Cognitive Hypnotherapist working in Central London at 1 Harley Street. He works both as a therapist and delivers training programmes to companies. Specialising in issues around confidence and self esteem, Zack also works utilising hypnosis and NLP around issues of anxiety and depression. Get in contact on 07738086632.

In both my private client work, various work with businesses and corporations and counselling at drama schools – i’ve noticed a real trend of reflectivity at this time of year. As we reach the half way point of 2011, people thinking about where they’ve come from since January and where they would like to be by December.

I’ve seen a variety of people for confidence issues, people who have previously been suffering from anxiety – and a few unusual phobias too. The common theme though has been that clients this month, even more than usual, have been in a place where they just feel stuck.

It’s interesting that idea of being ’stuck’ and how do we know when we are? It’s almost invariably a feeling. It might be an uncomfortable feeling in our stomach, or the heavy weighing down of our shoulders – something that just lets us know that not all is as it could be.

In many ways though – that feeling is helpful to us. It’s an excellent calibration mechanism between the start of treatment and the conclusion. It’s a good way of checking in with ourselves on how we’re feeling – the absence of the feeling of being stuck, or the replacement with an opposite feeling – just confirms that we’re starting to move on with our lives and find new choices.

It’s a little bit like the weather – we only notice the rain because it’s been so sunny or vice versa. It’s all news of difference.

So here’s the question – if you wanted news of difference in your life, how would you notice? What would it be? What differences would you be making from today?

And the most powerful question – how best can you being to implement those changes so you don’t have to feel stuck any longer?

Zack Polanski is a Cognitive Hypnotherapist working at 1 Harley Street. His work with NLP, Hypnosis and Pyschology is powerful in working with peoples confidence, anxiety, phobias, depression, self-esteem issues, relationships and coaching. You can call on 07738088632 or info@zackpolanski.com

Harley Street is just by Oxford Circus Tube and is accessible from North, South, East, West and Central London very easily.

A Clients’ personal flexibility or how to ride your bike on the Underground.

My poor bike. It’s windy and I’m cycling through North London to Swiss Cottage Library. It’s a Saturday, and I generally take a break from seeing clients and have some self-reflection and study time. I’ve recently had a pattern of cycling to a random location and reading some of the work of Gregory Bateson – who the following musings are largely inspired and indebted to. Bateson was a anthropologist, cyberneticist and philosopher among other things. John Grinder, co-creator of Neuro-Linguistic Programmng often credits him as being an influence upon his thinking.
I’m not really thinking about these things as I’m cycling though, I’m more wondering why I didn’t just get the tube. Camden Town to Swiss Cottage is just a few stops, although I’d still have to deal with the wind when I came out of the underground and walked to the library. Whereas the beauty of cycling is that you can pull up right out the front door.
There’s a much more abstract concept at play here, though. Although such a simple decision isn’t necessarily a collarary into thinking about the nature of one’s own existence – it nevertheless exists inherently within it. It’s a principle that lies at the heart of Bateson’s posthumous work finished by his daughter Angels Fear – An Investigation Into the Nature and Meaning of the Sacred.
On the tube, there is a very definite route which one can go to in a determined groove. It will be fast and it’s pretty certain where exactly (within a small margin of platform difference) your destination will be. It doesn’t allow for flexibility though and the choice of speed or route is very much determined by an other (ie the tubedriver and in turn, the tube controller.)
On the bike, I have a huge range of flexibility (within reason if I’m choosing to stay within the confines of the law) and now within a much larger boundary, but a boundary nonetheless, I can determine my own speed and journey – presumably in relation to the traffic around me. Yet, even with an indicative map in my pocket, I have little idea of the terrain around me or the traffic on this particular day.
It occurs to me as I’m blowing in the wind that the tube seems so attractive today. I wouldn’t have to make the choice out of a couple of options that currently all seem like they all have a slight taint of the unattractive and weather beaten.
Dealing with those conditions, when the tube would have lead me to the same place anyway – but would it have been the journey itself that mattered?
It’s one of a series of questions that has plagued and excited philosophers, the religious, the curious and scientists for generations and I don’t intend to solve it within my brief two wheeled expedition. I’m too busy gripping on for dear life for that and avoiding unyielding black cab drivers who I’m convinced have a sole intention this morning of removing one more cyclist from the hoard!
It’s interesting when we place these questions within the context of the therapeutic work we do. So many different methodologies, practices, subbranches, principles, presuppositions, ideas and models – before we even begin to look at the diversity in the clients themselves. Accepting the idea that at least at an unconscious level, every client has an intention in being in this space with you (otherwise they’d simply be somewhere else doing something else,) what principles or ideas are going to operate at the level of deterministic thinking over free will? Are you going to encourage your client to ride the tube with all it’s rigidity but certainty? Or are you going to encourage your client to ride their bike with all it’s flexibility but overwhelming choice?
I think, only from personal observation, that there’s a left leaning liberal factor to being a therapist. It’s certain inherent in the original presuppositions of NLP and Korzybski’s ‘The map is not the territory.” I think it’s a wonderful premise to work from which is my thinking for a consequence for clarity would be to consider that the territory is not the territory either. I’d imagine, and hope, that most therapists would instinctively presume that they don’t particularly use much ‘tube thinking’ with their clients. Railroading ideas and imposing their own maps, and what they perceive to be their values and beliefs on other people.
Stop and consider, though. How many times, if any, have you suggested to a client that as a result of seeing you they will now notice a change? Even if you haven’t suggested it explicitly, it’s implicit in the the very fact they came to see you with an issue or a problem. How many times, if any, have you said because of the anchor or the suggestive induction, they will now be free of their phobia or temptation to smoke? This is all endemic of Cause and Effect thinking.
A caveat here. Cause and Effect, which you may recognise as being utilised to a large extent by Milton Erickson, is embedded within our language. It’s there every time we ask a ‘Why’ question and it’s because (there I go again!) of this, or rather as a consequence, that it can be difficult to leave behind the shackles of tube line thinking.
There’s an argument to be had here that generally someones issues or problems in life are as a result of cause and effect thinking- so isn’t it better that we use the same thinking patterns to deprogramme them? It can work, and it can work effectively but is it ethical? Are we not merely turning a person from an unhappy robot to a happy robot, rather than encouraging a deeper epistemological change at the unconscious level into not being an obstacle in the space in which the development of a fully functioning human being unshackled from such restraints can flourish?
By way of demonstration, in his most accessible work Mind and Nature; A Necessary Unity – Bateson asks us to consider playing billards. We could take the best mathematicians and geometrists in the world, and they could correctly predict to an amazingly accurate quantification the exact angle and location at which the ball will cease to roll at once hit with the snooker cue.
If you replaced the billard cue with an animal, a cat for example, and chose to kick the cat (I really don’t condone animal violence but the hypothetical serves the example well) – there’s no possible way of ever predicting where the cat will land. The cat has choice. It can run, bite , scratch, hide, or give us a behaviour we could never expect. The cat is it’s own organic system within the wider system of the context of the situation and interacting with the other systems (ie The person kicking it and even the observers of the experiment.)

It’s getting cold and I need to concentrate on the road. To be continued….

UPDATE: I appreciate that the Journal Publication are fairly stringent in that their articles should ONLY be published in the journal. However, this first draft will be so unrecognisably different from the finished product, I don’t anticipate an issue. It is only the themes that shall remain the same and this is merely a playground in which to present them.

If the thought of philosophy or science usually makes you want to switch off- hold on there with me because it’s a really simple principle to grab hold of once you’ve heard it.

The idea is simply when we’re motivated to do something- we’re either moving towards something we want or moving away from something we don’t want. There’s been a lot of talk in Politics this month around the Government’s attitude towards Banks- whether to go for the stick or the carrot. Often they’re just deciding whether to help incentivise them or plonk sanctions on them.

It’s worth noticing that almost no one is solely motivated towards, and almost no one is solely motivated away from – they’re contextual. Where it can be useful though is if you’ve become stuck in a pattern for one particular context, it might be worth considering what other options could be available to you if you change your strategy.

Take two people, for example. Alex and Lee. They’re both pretty motivated people when it comes to working out and going to the gym- but they have completely different ways of doing it.

Alex goes to the gym by having a chart on his wall. On this chart, he ticks off how many bench presses he’s done and how many weight’s he’s lifted that week according to his 5×5 programme. Just ticking off the boxes is a huge thing to him, and he really enjoys seeing the progression. He’s really moving TOWARDS those goals that he wants to achieve.

Lee goes to the gym, in another way. She considers how overweight she’s going to look if she doesn’t go. She’s even got a picture of her from 5 years ago wehn she was really unhappy with her weight and she never wants to look like that again- she really wants to move AWAY from that side of her. Anything but that.

Now instinctively when we read these- we often want to consider ourselves TOWARDS people. Society has often moulded us to be positive and optimistic. Those things can be great; but again it’s contextual.

Take a Fireofficer for example. If Mark loves putting out fires and going in places just to rescue people. He loves that feeling of moving TOWARDS saving a life- it can be fantastic. What Mark really needs though for the safety of himself and the rest of the team is Lucy.

Lucy loves saving lives too- it’s why she does the job she chooses to do BUT she’s very good at spotting potential problems. She knows when to move AWAY from the building for the overall safety of everyone amd knows when to nip heroic acts in the bud and do whatever is necessary to be efficent, safe and caring all at the same time.

It’s interesting in the concept of business how towards people (i imagine like Richard Branson or Simon Cowell) are constantly moving towards things and coming up with new projects.

There are often stories of people though who are motivated by moving AWAY from esentially poverty. They come up with a fantastic plan, but then once they’ve made a successful business- they become complacent and self-sabotage it, almost. This is often usually because the criteria for the motivation has been removed from the situation.

And how is this relevant to therapy?

In Cognitive Hypnotherapy, we believe in working with the individual and their behaviours in the current moment. If your behaviour that’s unwanted, still has a positive intention- are you moving towards something you want different even pleasurable or are you moving away from something that’s going to be painful?

Either way, I’m happy to help and your intention is just one piece of the jigsaw. If you’d like to discuss any of these ideas or your personal circumstances, i’d be more than happy to chat to you on the phone (07738088632) or alternatively just drop me an e-mail (info@zackpolanski.com)

That Aristotle really knew his stuff.

Zack Polanski is a Cognitive Hypnotherapist working at The Lewis Clinic on 1 Harley Street. He is also an NLP Trainer having been trained by John Grinder, Carmen Bostic-St Claire and Michael Carroll. He works with a wide range of issues from smoking cessation to trauma, phobias, depression and confidence issues. Every individual is treated as just that- an individual and all work is confidential.

For Media Enquiries or actors/models/politicians, I am happy to liase initally through a recognised agent.

Have you noticed how as you get older your long-term memory seems to become increasingly sharp?

When I was in my teens I used to marvel at the facility of my elders to summon up complete passages of poetry or prose, while I fumbled for more than a phrase.

Now I find I can recite surprisingly large chunks of Horace Odes that we learned at school: “Pallida mors aequo pulsat pede pauperum tabernas regumque turres” – “Pale death knocks indiscriminately at the doors of the cottages of paupers and the palaces of kings”.

Every time I take a country walk, I am surprised to discover that I can recall the name of each common wild flower as my eye lights upon it – rosebay willowherb, birdsfoot trefoil, ladies’ bedstraw, meadow cranesbill – names my mother taught me on our childhood walks in the countryside around Monk’s Risborough in Buckinghamshire where we lived.

Perhaps most strange are those moments when something triggers an intense memory of an event that you had almost entirely forgotten, but which returns suddenly now with extraordinary clarity.

Here is a case in point. I went up to Cambridge in the 60s to read mathematics at Newnham College. In those days there was a separate entrance exam for Oxford and Cambridge, and my parents arranged for me to have coaching for the maths papers with a maths master at the boys’ school close to my family home in Highgate.

Once a week Mr Bellis taught me how to master the subtleties of university level maths problems, and in the process built up my wavering adolescent confidence, convincing me that there was nothing they could set me that I would not be able to solve.

It was Mr Bellis’s wife who suggested, when I arrived in Cambridge, that she should put me in touch with Timothy (let’s call him) – a former student of theirs, who was now in his final year at Fitzwilliam College (then Fitzwilliam House) reading history. It would make a nice introduction to student life, she proposed, he would help me to find my feet, and besides, he was such a charming young man.

Sure enough, shortly thereafter I received an invitation to tea with Tim at his lodgings in Silver Street. My Newnham fellow-students were impressed – Tim was a prominent figure in the university acting world, the star of a number of critically praised undergraduate productions. Mounting the stairs to his bed-sit, I felt grown up and rather sophisticated. The sensation of well-being increased as I sat in an armchair with sagging springs while Tim, dashing in a denim shirt, toasted crumpets at his three-bar gas fire, and entertained me with amusing anecdotes about undergraduate life.

Suddenly the door burst open. In rushed a small, elderly man, dishevelled as I remember, and dressed in some kind of crumpled dark grey overalls. Pointing his finger directly at me, he began hurling abuse: “I know your sort! I know what your kind of girl gets up to, you hussy! Now you just get out of here this minute!”

My newly-gained confidence collapsed like a soap-bubble. I struggled to my feet, barely able to hear Tim’s protestations above the din of the continuing verbal assault, and fled.

I never saw Tim again. I think, though I’m not sure, that he sent me a note of apology for what had happened. But I was too mortified even to consider repeating the experience. I put the incident to the back of my mind, and I barely thought about it for decades.

However, this particular story has a sequel. In July of this year I went back to Cambridge, where Mr and Mrs Bellis now live in their retirement, on the occasion of Mrs Bellis’s 80th birthday. There was a joyous party, in a marquee among the climbing roses and herbaceous borders of the garden she had lovingly planned and tended. I had only been there for minutes when I spotted Tim – virtually unchanged by the intervening years, and suddenly the incident of 40 years ago replayed itself before my eyes with extraordinary clarity.

I introduced my husband, and he in turn presented his wife. “Darling,” he exclaimed. “This is Lisa. She is the person I told you about, who once had such a nasty run-in with my landlord when we were at Cambridge.” “Oh yes,” she returned. “Whenever we hear you on the radio he reminds me of that awful occasion, and how devastated he was by it.”

I was dumbfounded. I had imagined that calamitous tea-party had barely made any impression on the sophisticated young actor who had hosted it. I was the one, I had thought, who had not known how to handle the social embarrassment. Not once had it occurred to me that he might have minded too.

Hilarity

Even as I tell this story, though, the historian in me feels a pang of anxiety. I am almost sure that not all those details I gave you about the bed-sit in Silver Street, and my recollection of what Tim looked like in his blue shirt, while I sat in the battered armchair by his spluttering gas fire, are accurate.

They became convincing and vivid as I turned my minds-eye back, shining the spotlight of my recently enhanced long-term memory upon them. I probably introduced some extraneous detail that actually belonged somewhere else in the capacious carpet-bag that is my middle-aged memory bank.

Although Tim and my accounts of the main facts were surprisingly similar and caused much hilarity in the retelling, what would have happened if we had expanded on that recollection, to include more impressionistic aspects of that fateful afternoon? Might we, together, have begun to embroider the basic facts, creating a composite account which resonated with other events that took place around the same time?

One consequence of the heightened sense of recall we acquire with age is that we find ourselves running together things that happened to us and things that were reported (in newspapers or on television) at the same time, or are told to us by those we knew.

Last year I chaired an evening of readings, performances and short talks at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, by and about celebrated Jewish writers for whom the old Whitechapel Library, with its books in Yiddish and German, had offered an intellectual lifeline when they arrived from Eastern Europe in the 1920s and 30s.

In the course of it, several speakers mentioned the Battle of Cable Street, which took place on Sunday 4 October 1936 in London’s East End. This was a clash between anti-fascists, including local Jewish, socialist, anarchist, Irish and communist groups and the British Union of Fascists, led by Oswald Mosley. Mosley’s intention had been to send thousands of marchers dressed in uniforms styled on those of Mussolini’s Italian blackshirts provocatively through a district which was predominately Jewish. The anti-fascists turned out to stop him, and the result was a pitched battle between the Metropolitan Police, fascists and anti-fascists.

At that Whitechapel Gallery evening, everyone there over 80 could vividly recall the Battle of Cable Street. Most said they had witnessed it at first-hand, and the scenes of out-of-control street-fighting had clearly burned themselves in on their memory. Some could describe as if it were yesterday the fear they felt, as the event descended into near-anarchy. All the same, I had a sneaking feeling that since they could not have been more than 10 or 12 at the time, perhaps one or two of them were recalling those chaotic events with help from Pathe newsreels or the memories of others.

I am not suggesting that any of us does other than tell the utter truth as we recall it, when we narrate these intensely-remembered moments from our personal past. Rather, I am admitting that, as someone with a reputation, I hope, for telling persuasive stories from my own life, I might not always get it absolutely right, and that while that does not detract from an entertaining tale, for on-the-record purposes it might not quite match other versions of the same events.

When we historians try to recover the past, the first person “I” of oral testimony, the voices of those who were there, are particularly seductive. Their strength of feeling communicates itself to us as no written record ever could. It connects us, compels our continuing attention, prevents our ever forgetting. Where the factual detail is concerned, though, if I’m anything to go by, I suspect it would be a good idea to cross-check for historical accuracy.

Zack Polanski is a Cognitive Hypnotherapist and NLP Trainer. He works with issues of confidence, phobias, helping me to stop smoking, low self-esteem and stress. He works from The Lewis Clinic at 1 Harley Street, London.

Their trainings are always excellent and i’d thoroughly reccomend it to anyone who’s interested in learning more about the world of Cognitive Hypnotherapy.

Among the skills that were being developed were Dilt’s sleight of mouth patterns (A personal favourite), Eye Movement Integration (Particularly useful in working with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) and various uses of working with Inner space in Outer Space.

NLP New Code often does the latter in various guises and forms, and it was interesting to see it put in a different context.

I love going on trainings; as much as I enjoy working with various clients and all the different issues and ideas that people bring into the room with them at Harley Street- I really enjoy the odd weekend in London around other therapists sharing ideas and progressing the advancement of the field.

I also think it’s really important to keep training. I attend at least five days further training every month to make sure that I’m keeping up to date with the latest advancements in new technologies and ideas around the therapeutic relationship.

Some of the things that were really interesting to me in January were phobias, anxiety, lack of confidence, canabis and stop smoking cessation arenas.

This coming weekend i’m assisting coaching on a New Code Neurolinguistic Programming Course in Regent’s Park with Peter Salisbury and Associates which is in a run up to an Advanced New Code training I’m participating in with Dr John Grinder in February in France.

I’ll keep the blog updated as we go!