Hypnosis - Discussion between Michael Beale and John La Valle, January 2008.

John La Valle is a Licensed Master Trainer of NLP™ & DHE™, who has been in the training & development field for almost twenty-five years and who has brought NLP™ and DHE™ into the business arena for the past 20+ years.



(You can listen on the MP3 file below but please allow up to 2 minutes to download)

http://www.nlp-expert.co.uk/hypnosis/john.mp3

Michael : Firstly John, thank you very much for agreeing to take part in this podcast,

John : Thanks.

Michael : To kick it off would you introduce yourself so that our listeners know a little bit about who you are and what you do?

John : Well my name is John, my last name is La Valle, and I think most people might know who I am apart from those who might not, I do NLP trainings, and I do lot of them with Richard Bandler, I also take care of the administrative things for the Society of NLP for Richard. I do a lot of training, I co-wrote a book with Richard of Persuasion Engineering, sales and business, things like that – I think that most people would probably know who I am though.

Michael : What is hypnosis?

John : Hypnosis to me, really, really is nothing more than exquisite, really exquisite communication.

Michael : And what drew you to the subject, and what’s your background in it?

John : I have to tell you – years and years and years ago, oh gosh, I must have been twelve, or even thirteen – something like that – I was fascinated by the idea of hypnosis, and I remember seeing those little ads at the backs of comic books and things like that, and the guy with the darts coming out of his eyes and the hypnotron wheel, and I remember seeing those and thinking ‘whoa, this stuff looks really cool!’, and so I learned hypnosis and all of these things. Of course I was only young at the time so didn’t really get into it, but it really peeked my interest, that far back.

And then a friend of mine, I forget how old I was, I might have been maybe in my twenties, early twenties – maybe I was twenty years old or so – and I’m happily talking to a friend of mine, and happened to mention that I was interested in some hypnosis, and learning hypnosis and what it was about, and he told me that he was actually doing hypnosis, which I really didn’t have any idea that he was. And he sent me one of these self-hypnosis cassette tapes.

Michael :And

John : So I immediately plugged it in. And I was fascinated. I went into an altered state and was able to program myself based on the instructions on the tape where it said ‘at the end of this tape if you want to stay in this nice relaxed state’ or whatever it was ‘or if you want to relax for another ten minutes past that, or to tell yourself that’ whatever, and it happened, and I was really really amazed that I could give myself a set of instructions in a deep altered state and it would work.

Michael : And how’s it helped you personally?

John : I’ve been able to relax better with it, I’ve been able to reprogram myself better with it, I’ve been able to do all kinds of things, I guess. I’ve learned a lot of things over the last twenty years or so. One of them being that just about anything is possible in trance, and so if there’s something that people want to try out, is that they ought to try it in an altered state and the altered state by the way, is really a chemical state change that we produce in our brain – now I do think it’s about exquisite communication, I believe hypnosis is going on all the time. That’s how people change beliefs, they could be watching TV and watching the news, getting hit with so many things of the same topic, and also they’ll be hit with something that they then realise is true.

So I really believe that it’s going on, I believe that it’s going on all of the time. So for me it’s been a way for me to go in and reprogram some things that I’ve needed to reprogram for myself, even to learn some things, and more than anything else to learn to relax when I want to.

Michael : Building on that, what would you say it’s main use is generally?

John : Well, you know Michael, when I look at it, there are a couple of things – I said earlier that I really believe that hypnosis is exquisite communication which is really going on all the time, I think that the main use that most people think that it’s for is for therapeutic or coaching types of activities, things where they want to change personal behaviour. But the fact is, I believe that it’s really going on and being used in the mainstream by media, by politicians and things like that, whether they know it or not – so the only other question is – if they don’t know it, than they ought to, and if they do know it there’s more than that many uses for it.

So I hear lots of people making distinctions where they want to know the difference between the conscious and the unconscious mind, which of course don’t really exist in an abstract sense, but to me they do exist in terms of how much activity is going on. So conscious is what we’re aware of and unconscious it what we’re not aware of. But everything is really going on, so my thought is, if they’re consciously aware of what’s going on then they know, and if they’re not, it doesn’t mean that these process’s are no longer occurring.

Michael : Ah, taking that a bit further, do you think that there are any specific business applications or do you think that’s been covered by what you’ve said before?

John : I think it’s been pretty well covered. In business it’s really quite an entertaining idea when you think about it, most business’ will not entertain the idea of doing any hypnosis within their business – and I understand that. I remember when my son was back in school the kids were forbidden to have or even ask another child to close their eyes and think of something. Because they were afraid that the children would be able to hypnotise the other children. Then, that didn’t mean that they weren’t, it meant that the teachers weren’t aware that they were actually doing all these things.

So I think in business, we actually call it ‘closed eye process’s’ how can you not – if hypnosis is everything – I looked up a definition once, for hypnosis, and it said something about altered states and I looked up altered state, and altered state really only means ‘the state other than the one that you were just in previously’ so we really do go from state to state, emotional state, brain chemistry states, things like that, but this is happening in business every day.

So whether or not we’re allowed to tell people to close their eyes, or get them to do a guided imagery, or closed eye process, or ‘lets do hypnosis!’ is basically, to me, irrelevant, because we’ll just do open eye hypnosis if that’s what people want to do.

The fact is they still have to follow the law -I tell people the following thing – I go ‘here’s something that you have to understand about anything you do about hypnosis, or about what you consider to be hypnosis, or exquisite communication – you must listen and then hear – or first hear and then listen to, every word that the speaker says. And that’s just so you can understand what they’re saying. And that’s before you can disagree. But by the time you’ve already gotten it into your brain, it’s already too late. It’s already in there, you’ve already gotten the suggestion, you’re going to carry it through.

That’s why when I hear the silly things, like when they’re in court and they say to the jury ‘please just disregard that last statement’ there’s no way that they can disregard it.

Michael : (laughter)

John : What they might do with that information is it could end up being something else, but they’ve already got it into their brain. To me it’s not about whether somebody closes their eyes, or whether somebody swings a watch in front of their eyes, before they close their eyes or anything like that – its just a matter of how well is the communication passed through? So I think that there’s a lot of opportunity in business.

Michael :Ok, taking from that, do you think that there are any dangers, or are there any caution that you’d give somebody who was thinking about seeing a hypnotist, or considering going on hypnosis training?

John : I tend to think not. I’ve heard different arguments from different people about whether or not somebody could be harmed with hypnosis or whether or not we could control another persons mind, and I really believe that we’re really in control of our own behaviour. If somebody could truly be programmed, and it requires something a little bit more than hypnosis – when I look back at the Jim Jones thing where he had all these people drinking this poisoned cool-aid and stuff – that was beyond hypnotism, that was something other than hypnosis, it certainly required a set of skill that he had in order to influence them and convince them, that would also require protein deprivation, sleep deprivation, and a whole bunch of other things over an extended period of time before they would be willing to follow this guy. And I’m not that sure that he was all that good at hypnosis anyway, in terms of being able to getting people to do these kinds of things.

I think it’s true that if somebody’s going to see somebody who does hypnosis they should be sure that the person is pretty well qualified, but not because they might get hurt, it’s only because they should be sure of what they’re getting.

Read the complete article: John La Valle on Hypnosis