Jess Marion - The Hypnotic Coach: A Conversational Hypnotherapy Tool Kit

The Hypnotic Coach

A Conversational Hypnotherapy Tool Kit

By

Jess Marion

Changing Mind Publishing

New York, NY

The Hypnotic Coach: A Conversational Hypnotherapy Tool Kit

2021 Jess Marion. All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles and reviews.

For further information, please contact Changing Mind Publishing at:

545 8 th Avenue, Suite 1430, New York, N.Y. 10018

Table of Contents

Section 1: Foundations

Section 2: The Body

Section 3: Language

Section 4: Working with Clients

Section 5: Advanced Skills

Acknowledgments

I am eternally thankful for the love and support I have received while completing this book and beyond. In particular, I would like to acknowledge the contributions of John and Kirsten Overdurf and Sarah and Shawn Carson.

A heartfelt thanks to John, whose insights and contributions to the field of coaching form the backbone of this book and have been the primary influence in my approach to hypnotic coaching. Thank you, John, for your close friendship and mentoring, which, over the years, have transformed my perspective on change work and, beyond that, life. Thank you, Kirsten, for all your encouragement and all the laughs we have shared.

A deep thanks to Sarah and Shawn Carson, my co-trainers and best friends. Thank you, Sarah, for your eye for detail in helping refine the manuscript and keeping me focused through the writing of some of the more challenging chapters. Thank you, Shawn, for being a constant source of inspiration and bringing new perspectives to client cases. Without you both, this book would not have made it to publication.

Finally, thank you to all the clients who selflessly allowed their transcripts to be used in this book. You have given the community of professionals a precious gift that will help others make powerful changes in their lives.

Foreword

I have no doubt reading this superb book by Jess Marion will take your coaching to the next level. And that is not a suggestion - only to the extent you already know thisunconsciously.

It is a comprehensive, thoughtful, and fun expedition through the best of what the field of hypnotic coaching has to offer. Clear, well sequenced, and laid out with excellent examples, it will not be easy to resist relaxing into your own training trance, as you take breaks, in between, to fully integrate what speaks to you most in this book.

About Jess

It was 2012 when we first met Jess. She was assisting at a Training New Trances workshop I was doing in New York City for Melissa Tiers, where Shawn and Sarah Carson had graciously offered their training room for the training. Jess was sitting in the front row and all in.

After the last day of the training, she, Kirsten, Melissa Tiers, and I enjoyed a delightful evening of Italian-American goodness at the San Genaro Festival. After a lively, delicious meal, we all stopped at a bar to chat before going home, where we all had fun tormenting our friend, Shawn, via text. Later, Jess and I had a wonderful conversation sharing our backgrounds, especially our affinity for Eastern Philosophy. It felt like wed known each other for years - or more. : )

A year later, she attended an NLP Trainers Training I was running where she was a standout, just at the beginning her training career. After watching her do a presentation of the six step reframe, I remember saying to her, You may not realize this yet, but youre a superstar. Her talent, heart, dedication, as well as her academic rigor, was already so present. It was obvious her trajectory would continue, as it has with this book, her many other contributions, and perhaps more importantly, the other challenges she has transcended at this point in her life. I remember saying to Kirsten, that if we were ever to have someone be part of what we do, Id pick Jess. Lucky for us, shes become a dear friend.

Much of this book echoes what I have developed over the forty years Ive been doing therapy, coaching and training. If I am honest - and why not be, right? - Jesss book is like the book which beautifully characterizes my approach to coaching, that I never wrote! To read the richness and depth of her work warms my heart and reassures me of all of the promise and talent she had when we first met, as does as her friendship ever since. All we are is changing. Jess and her work are a sterling testament.

About Hypnotic Coaching - A Primer

More than 20 years ago, it seemed to me, the acid test for coaching was how would much of what I do fly in a corporate context rather than a therapy office. Coaching had become an integral part of the corporate culture. While folks were open to optimizing performance, many were not into the therapy thing. That along with doing almost exclusively phone coaching led to the conversational approach Ive developed and have employed over the years: It had to be like an animated conversation, but deepened through the use of hypnotic principles and state elicitation to create true transformation, not just cognitive insight. The Hypnotic Coach does an excellent job of describing the theory and the how tos while integrating it with her own embellishments, insights, and unique contributions.

In a nutshell, the process of hypnotic coaching is the ability to work in an uptime, conversational delivery using hypnotic principles to activate richer unconscious activation to create deep transformation. It enables the coach to segue back and forth between an uptime delivery and more classic downtime trance work using more obvious hypnotic phenomena like catalepsy, arm levitation, amnesia, etc.

Its not a monologue as is traditional hypnosis or even what some folks call conversational hypnosis today. As youll read and which may occur to you, this hypnotic coaching relationship is very much a team effort. It is an unfolding, often non-linear dialogue , at times, more like art and poetry, which illuminates the richness and power of the unconscious mind of the client.and of youthe coach.

So, speaking to you as a hypnotic coach, your job is to be curious and to manage the process of therapeutic change. The clients job is to be honestly willing to explore the rhizomatic majesty of ones mind, being open to new connections as they happen, then put into practice the new changes.

To format your unconscious mind so youll retain and integrate whats in this book more effectively, heres some highlight points on the Overdurfian take on hypnotic coaching, which was a refinement of the HNLP Coaching Model. The Hypnotic Coach will be your guide to going even deeper into the principles, the practice, and beyond.

Keep Coaching in NOW. Change can only occur in now. Often what subverts changes we want is our inability to stay in now. If a client has an issue, the mind will often trip out from current emotions and sensations to thoughts and memories about the past and future which only exacerbate the current emotion. And, the same can happen with the coach! When we spend too much time inside, perhaps wondering what to do or why something isnt working weve left now, and are missing the news which is on the outside. This is the same dynamic which lies deep within the process of the client which creates the presenting problem.

We are professional attention-shifters, so our job is to identify and shift the clients habits of attention which maintain and may even generalize the issue, a la neuroplasticity. How do you do this? Well, theres a number of practical suggestions which Jess will explain to you, but for now, let me share perhaps one of the biggest discoveries I had: whenever inside over-thinking, feeling stuck, etc, train yourself to ask the client, Whats happening, now? That will bring you back outside in now, paying attention to the clients response, and it will re-set the clients attention to now. As an attention shifter, you can punctuate and re-direct their attention by asking it, including any other representational system; be it kinesthetic, visual, auditory, internal or external. (How is your body feeling now? What are you seeing, now? What are you hearing, now,? What are you saying to yourself, now?)