Blog | Hypnotherapist and NLP Practitioner Potters Bar, Herts

Easy Sharing With Quick Code

Aug 1st, 10 / 0 Comments

I have added a new feature to the Ace Hypnosis website today and included a page in the Frequently asked Questions area about it, but i thought i would summarise it here too.

It’s all about the strange square code box at the bottom of each page, and how you can use it.

I am an avid reader of blogs from other professionals in the field of Hypnotherapy, NLP and other subjects that relate to the well being of my own clients. Every week, and sometimes daily, new ideas and discoveries are made that move us all forward and enhance our skill set, allowing us to offer even more support.

Today, whilst reading through my regular intake of latest news, I noticed that at the bottom of one of the articles was the small 2D Barcode or Quick Code as they are also known. I have seen these in recent months appearing all over the place, and some major chains are now using them for their loyalty cards, as they can easily be displayed on your suitably equipped mobile telephone.

Thats all fine but what is the point of them here I hear you say – well at least I did!

The Quick Code is a simple way of saving the web address or Url of a particular page to your mobile device, so that you can read it later. There is a wide range of modern telephones equipped with a camera that can take advantage of this simple system. When you have the quick Code app installed on your mobile, you just take a snap shot of the code on the screen, and the device reads the code and changes it into the web address or Url of the page you were reading.

Now you may have a great memory and be able to recall with ease, the long Url that you need to type into your web browser when wishing to view the same page again elsewhere. You can also email a link to that page to yourself so that you can navigate back again. You could have a fancy set up that links your bookmarks and favourites between all the computers you use, perhaps if you use a computer at work and at home. Or, you could use the sociable options at the foot of each page here, and share the pages with your friends and colleagues, making it easy for you to find it again yourself.

Perhaps you do none, some or all of these things, but it is important that we embrace change and have as many options and possibilities available to us.

Why not try it for yourself and have a go!

There are various applications available to allow you to read these codes, and a simple google search will show you your options. I opted for the app from QuickMark which is available for the Apple iPhone, Android devices, Windows Mobile and S60. If you have a suitable device, you can visit their site and download the application. There may be a small fee for these applications.

Once ‘scanned’ into your phone, you also have the option to Send to a friend, Email or post to Twitter or FaceBook.

Now I love technology and I make as much use of it as possible to make my life easier, freeing up more of my time for the things I class as important to me. You may not be so keen on taking advantage of ideas like these and that’s fine too. At least after reading this article, you will know what these strange little squiggly boxes are all about in future.

Alan Herbert – Hypnotherapist and NLP Practitioner | acehypnosis.co.uk | follow me on twitter

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Living & Learning, Technology

Do You Déjà Vu ?

Jul 11th, 10 / 2 Comments

Just the other day, I was chatting with someone and they talked about a ‘Déjà Vu moment’ they had had earlier in the week. As I listened, their experience of the Déjà Vu moment expanded into what they considered to be some psychic phenomenon. Wow, do we all have such psychic abilities!

Because Déjà Vu kind of rolls off the tongue, it is a term that is often used when the reality of the situation would be easier to explain.

The internet has page upon page of information about this phenomenon but very little of the research has been carried out under scientific conditions. It appears that true Déjà Vu can only be experienced if the situation in which it happens is a completely new or alien environment. I’m not suggesting that little green men from Mars need to be present, just that you can not experience Déjà Vu somewhere you have been before or with those you have previously spent time with.

The Human mind is like a massive hard drive that stores all our experiences and memories, however, if it had to index every single moment in our lives to make them readily available, our thought process would be extremely slow and probably stall completely at times. We therefore have to accept that our mind, only makes readily available certain snippets of information from our past.

We have probably all been in that situation where we start to watch a film that sounds good, and part way through we have that realisation that “I’ve already seen this”. Now we don’t consider that to be Déjà Vu – do we?

A similar thing happens when we visit a familiar place or are talking with friends and then we get that feeling that ‘I’ve seen this before’ or ‘I’ve already done this’. You probably have! It could well be a mix of situations, perhaps someone is telling you something in a certain room, it might be insignificant, but you get that feeling you have been here listening to this before. You ask them about it and they say it’s the first time they have told you. Well you probably heard something similar from someone else in the same room or a room just like it, and our memories are stirred enough to let us believe it is an example of Déjà Vu.

Another offering is this. You may have been sitting down with a friend talking, and then that same feeling comes over you ‘we’ve had this conversation before’. When we are familiar and comfortable with people, we kind of tune into the way they respond both physically and verbally. This is not always on a conscious level but on an unconscious one, where our recognition of the others responses are not so obvious. As you continue discussing or chatting on a more relaxed level, your unconscious mind already has a pattern of predictable responses in place, especially as you are generating one half of the conversation. Consequently, what you hear may be deemed to be Déjà Vu but it is actually a form of precognition, as you have previously experienced similar responses, you just haven’t logged them so well.

For Déjà Vu to be considered real, you would have no prior knowledge of the situation or those involved, and have no expectation to experience something familiar. Perhaps you are travelling somewhere and stop in a place you have never been before. Everything appears quite normal until you step into a shop to buy a drink and find the shop assistant has started to play the piano, and you get that feeling for a moment that you have experienced this before. Now this store does not sell pianos, only food and drinks so you would not have expected to see such a thing. They were not playing as you approached so you could not have predicted what greeted you. This is true Déjà Vu.

I am no expert in the field of Déjà Vu, and much more can be read about the subject on sites like this, but it is important to recognise the potential we have shut away in our minds, ready to bring us benefits.

Our minds are truly amazing, and so often hold the keys to the solutions we seek. It is this wealth of knowledge we store, that is accessed during hypnotherapy allowing us to make incredible changes in our lives.

Alan Herbert – Hypnotherapist and NLP Practitioner | acehypnosis.co.uk | follow me on twitter
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Hypnotherapy

Determination, Or Is It Something Else!

Jun 28th, 10 / 2 Comments

It’s funny how often we use the word Determined to describe a person, probably just as easily as we would say the word stubborn for others, but what is really going on here. Now as well as the England Team having their own, lets call them difficulties for the sake of taking a neutral stand point this morning, I had a bit of a challenge myself over the last few days.

I have been setting up my new website acehypnosis.co.uk and it is the first time I have ventured into the realms of WordPress. For those of you unfamiliar with that name, it is a web package that allows you to construct and manage website pages online, from any location, by multiple users if required, simply with the use of a web browser. As far as layout and control are concerned, it is not my favourite method, but very little comes close when it comes to running a blog and keeping people up to date with your latest ramblings – Oh sorry, Informative articles that should read.

Everything had been going well. I was happier with the look and feel of the site as it’s evolving, and my posts/articles were being sent out to those that had subscribed via the RSS feed. Yipee! Doesn’t it make you feel good when everything is working as you intended? Then, I noticed that the last article I had written and posted on my site, had only been sent out as what is referred to as a teaser or extract, which is just the first couple of lines. All my previous posts had been sent out in full, which is a great way to allow your subscribers to read them without needing to re-visit the website. so what had changed!

Well, I don’t mind telling you that I have spent hour upon hour trawling through all the settings over and over again looking for inspiration. I have posted questions on the main WordPress help section and still nothing. For Fathers Day, I had received a bundle of gifts from my son (and wife) one of which was the beginners guide to WordPress, and I had scanned all 210 pages looking for inspiration, and still no joy. I am not going to go into the depths of what I did try and the mini disasters that struck en route, just to say that eventually I found a solution. I had upgraded to the latest version of the software and it seems to have made the original RSS feed behave differently.

I was so happy, I can’t tell you – Ok I am telling you! So happy in fact that even though we had ventured into the wee hours of the morning, as I was burning the midnight oil to get to the bottom of this, I made my wife get up to come and see the full length post coming in. You guessed it, she wasn’t that impressed I had disturbed her, but she could see how happy I was and praised me for my ‘determination’. “I knew you would sort it out” she said. I beamed a smile at my screen for a while, feeling particularly pleased and relieved at the same time, and that got me thinking about ‘Determination’

So where does determination come from and what distinguishes it from stubbornness?

To understand this, I have to cast my mind back to that moment when I realised that the problem was solved. What was I thinking, what did resolving this give me that had driven me so. The fact is, each and every one of us could do this. We could ask ourselves when we accomplish something, even something seemingly insignificant, What did achieving this give us? How much did we want it? What skills and resources did we have that enabled us to achieve it? How did we know or what were we looking for, that showed us we had achieved? If we just think about these few questions here, and ask them of ourselves in relation to something we recently did well, the answers will probably come to mind quite easily. If we run through the same questions again with something that we did not do so well, then the chances are that we may have to look a little deeper for the answers, as we had not been aware of them.

So when I asked myself these questions, what did I hear?

As a couple of my readers had requested this change to my RSS feed, I wanted to show that I care. I want my subscribers to have the best experience when reading my blog, as I feel that this will retain them and keep them interested in what I have to say. There would be little point in me writing my blog to share the benefit of my experiences with others, if no one was going to read it in full,and so this was very compelling to me. I have a level of knowledge about the internet and web design, and so I knew that there would be a solution in sight. Keeping all that in mind, seeing the delivery of a full post would tell me that I had solved the problem and that all the above goals would have been achieved.

At times, we are driven to avoid problems and situations, and it is all to easy to maintain this habit of being motivated away from things. On other occasions we are motivated towards something, a goal or a dream we have, and we can make far better use of our resources if we set a plan in motion to achieve. In NLP terms, this is known as the well formed outcome. It is ‘always‘ essential to know exactly what you want and be a descriptive in your mind as you possibly can. Imagine for a while that you have already achieved your goal. Think about how good that feels. Think about how others may see your achievement. Notice in your mind how differently things are with this achievement. Think about all those things, all those skills and resources that you have right now that will help you to do that. Perhaps you notice things that you may need that you don’t have just now, and how you can go about including those. And then think about what will be your sign, what will indicate to you that you have achieved. It’s bad enough when others move the ‘goal posts’, so let’s make sure we don’t do it to ourselves. It is also good to recognise that you can be flexible, you can change what you are doing if it is not getting the results you need, and this is what distinguishes determination from stubbornness.

I could just have sent out an Email to my subscribers to say – To get the full RSS Feed, you may need to subscribe to the new link – But I think this was better.

Well another busy day awaits and so I leave you with those thoughts.

Alan Herbert – Hypnotherapist and NLP Practitioner | acehypnosis.co.uk | follow me on twitter

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Hypnotherapy, Living & Learning

How Dreams Can Demonstrate What Goes On Inside

Jun 22nd, 10 / 0 Comments

When I woke up this morning, it was one of those rare occasions when I actually remembered the body of what I had been dreaming about.

I know that some people like to analyse dreams and delve into the content, whereas I imagine my mind being a huge store room of filling cabinets. When I rest, little mini me’s run around like headless chickens filing away all the things I had pulled out earlier and finding homes for all the new learnings and experiences generated during that day. The only way the mini me’s can know where to file things, is to read them to get an idea of the best place to put them. I believe that It is these ‘snippets’ of information, that form our dreams.

Last night saw the release of Apples ios4 – the latest software for the iPhone and iPod touch – and this in turn required an update to the latest version of iTunes. Our internet was taking a severe bashing as we are a household of mac users, and we do love our technology. We had several computers all hitting Apple’s servers, greedily demanding the latest version of their software and as time went on, the download speed was getting slower and slower. Eventually, in the small hours of the morning, everything in the House of Herberts – an unfortunate phrase but it makes me laugh – was up and running again with the coolest gadgets to leave Cupertino [ The Home of the Mac ] . Relieved and ready for bed, I retired for the night.

This brings me nicely back to that dream I talked about earlier. Hopefully, at least some of you will have seen that great film Zulu, with Michael Caine. Now I hasten to add that this film was made back in 1964, I while before i sprang to life, but never the less I have enjoyed watching it on several occasions. The key point about this is the stand that Michael made with his few remaining soldiers at the end of the film, against the Zulu Warriors. They were clearly out numbered but reluctantly stood their ground until the bitter end.

In my dream, I could see Michael Caine in his bright red uniform, walking up and down a line of troops instructing them on how they were to stand guard over the information being given out from those massive servers at Apple. “Give them just enough to keep them happy lads” Is what I was hearing. It seemed really major and very vivid. When I woke up, I remember thinking that was probably a tough night for them.

The thing about all this, is how when we don’t have much else to occupy our minds, we allow other ‘stuff’ to amplify and fill all that unused space in our heads. You know how sometimes we wake in the early hours, thinking about something that appears to be a big issue to us at the time, and yet in the morning, it’s much less of a concern. We have filled our minds with many different things by this stage, so each of them can only occupy an appropriate amount of space, putting things back into perspective for us.

A similar thing happens when we dwell on problems. If we focus on the negative aspect of a problem, omitting anything useful from our thought process, there is room for anxiety about that problem to grow, until eventually the problem can seem overwhelming.

It is always sensible to keep sight of the good things that we have in life, and give those just as much, if not more attention than things that bother us.

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Living & Learning, Technology

The State Of English Football

Jun 19th, 10 / 1 Comment

Now, those of you who already know me, have the advantage of understanding my take on Sport. For those of you who are getting to know me, I am not a follower of Sports but i do strongly believe in a sporting chance.

I have not seen any of the recent games played in the World Cup, over in beautiful South Africa, but it is nigh on impossible not to catch sight of the so called highlights replayed over and over at every opportunity on the news stations and any TV and Radio show that carries any sort of discussion, so I am up to speed as it were on the England teams current plight. The source of most of my updates, however, has been the online ramblings in blogs, tweets and posts by my circle of learned friends and colleagues who are aficionados in the field of football.

I titled this post today – The state Of English Football – as I am mostly interested in the state that people get themselves into when they subject themselves to the torture of watching a game that has such a saddening outcome. Now obviously my view is somewhat removed from that of e keen follower, but it will certainly make more sense on a logical level. As I have flicked back through these posts and tweets i mentioned, that were made during the game and afterwards, it is clear that a state was building within these commenting spectators. They were becoming more anxious and even more enraged by the skills offered by the players, and the once articulate writers had resorted to posting harsh one liners. By the end of the game, they had beaten themselves up sufficiently over the result, that they needed to vent their feelings initially with their keyboards, and then with alcohol and commiserating hugs from their fellow sufferers.

Why oh why do we do that to ourselves. Yes, I will admit that having a certain level of pain in your life will make you appreciate pleasure even more than you already do, but is it really necessary with todays technology to go through this anxiety. Surely the best solution with the aid of todays technology is to wait and hear the result. Do something more productive with your time whilst the game is live. You can get so much more done as the rest of the unfortunate souls are glued to their TV sets. Tesco’s was lovely and clear and I can not recall the last time shopping on a Friday night was so good. Then when you have the result, you can choose to watch the game or just those so called ‘highlights’. At least you won’t be disappointed and drag yourself painfully through every moment of play where you think you could do better.

I was taught some time ago now, that it is no good practice to rely on the actions of others to generate your own feelings, values or emotions. Yes it is good to support your country and to want to win when there is so much gloom around, but is it sensible to let the actions of 11 men affect the mood of an entire nation.

Perhaps if we thought how good the Algerians are probably feeling right now, we could feed off of their energy and give ourselves a little boost.Personally I think that 22 guys fighting over a single ball is daft anyway. If we sent them 21 more balls, wouldn’t that remove any squabbling?

I am still coming to terms with the fact that I have written about football here today. But then again, it’s not about the football to me, it’s about how ‘fans’ get themselves in such a state over something that is out of their control. If a sport does not give you pleasure, why bother with it?

Fill your life with things you really enjoy and experiences that you will love to share with others. It will make you feel much better about yourself.

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Living & Learning

The Hypnotic Effect of the Progress Bar – Really!

May 12th, 10 / 0 Comments

A few of days ago, my son had decided to upgrade one of his computers to enable him to make use of all the benefits of the latest version of the operating system. Now I not only love, but I embrace whole heartedly, the idea that children should take on adventures and challenges of their own, just as us ‘grown ups’ should continually encourage ourselves by try something different. I don’t mind telling you though that I had some reservations.

I should mention at this point that my son is now a teenager, a mighty 13 years old and probably one of the more cautious members of our household. With that in mind I trust his judgement and hoped that he has not left any little golden nugget of data behind, before he wipes his hard drive and begins the process. I kept my crossed fingers out of site the entire time.

He didn’t actually need me to be with him, but he was so excited about what he was going to be able to do, that I pulled up a chair and made myself comfortable for the next hour to share his experience. After a few clicks, a bit of frantic keyboard action and a quick disc swap, the screen went decidedly black and then grey…. followed by a deathly silence. I could feel my heart pounding, wondering if this was it! The final curtain for the old computer, until I managed to pull my gaze away from the screen and looked at my son, who had this amazing carefree look on his face as he tapped his fingers on the desk.

“Is that right” I said. He just looked at me, smiled and turned back to look at the screen with almost perfect timing – I was sure there was a director hiding somewhere who had just shouted action – as it sprang into life and we were presented with a bright new window. A few more clicks and high speed typing, swapped this options screen for the now visible progress bar. I have seen these many times before, as they appear whenever you instal a new application or perform some sort of update, but I have never paid much heed to them before, until now.

I was feeling better, my heart rate had returned to it’s normal rate and I was feeling very relaxed. The progress bar was doing it’s whirly thing and I settled back in my chair and just listened. I listened for the next 45 minutes to my son telling me about all the new features, all the things he was going to be able to do, how fantastic this upgrade would be. And as I listened, I was transfixed by the progress bar.

So many of the things we do in life, we have a good idea about the outcome. We know what is required from us, what we will need to do and what shows us we have done that. It could be something as simple as cutting the grass. We know how the lawn will look when it’s cut, which is how we know it needs cutting in the first place – right! Or it could be something like running a race. A friend of mine recently entered into and completed I hasten to add, the London Marathon. Now he knew what was required of him, he knew how much he needed to put into this to finish the race – even if he did lower our expectations by telling us he was older and heavier than on previous occasions – and he would see the finish line which would give him something very special. With all those things, we have a level of control.

By contrast, we have no control with the progress of the software installation, and so we get the progress bar. This was the only sign we had of just how well things were going. and as I continued to listen, with the progress bar getting closer and closer to the end, I could feel the anticipation building inside of me. There was nothing I could do to push that bar those last couple of millimetres, which seemed to take an eternity. No last minute burst of energy or second wind was going to help here. I just had to wait and let the anticipation do it’s thing.

Finally, the computer sprang into life and we were greeted with a host of welcomes in almost all languages. I think by that time, I would have been happy with almost anything, which made this fantastic display of graphical genius even more tantalising. Having been staring at the building progress bar and listening to my sons positive statements about all the wonderful new benefits this would bring, I was already conditioned for great things. And I have to say, I wasn’t disappointed.

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Hypnotherapy

Do You Déjà Vu ?

Determination, Or Is It Something Else!

So where does determination come from and what distinguishes it from stubbornness?

So when I asked myself these questions, what did I hear?

How Dreams Can Demonstrate What Goes On Inside

The State Of English Football

The Hypnotic Effect of the Progress Bar – Really!

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