Who is hypnotising you?

I picked up the phone yesterday and it was a recorded message and included the words “do not hang up” which of course I did. Which reminded me of a friend who regularly stayed in a hotel with signs in the bathroom saying “have you forgotten anything” and she regularly did forget to take things home with her there too.

These are both examples of how easy it is to become hypnotised ie our unconscious picks up on the cues and takes action accordingly. I’m not sure the phone message intends us to hang up but that’s certainly what they’re saying to our unconscious. I wonder how many times my friend had to read the note for her unconscious to pick up she should forget something?

Richard Bach, who wrote Jonathan Livingston Seagull, brought out a book last year entitled ‘Hypnotising Maria’. He opens with a great story about the main character being on stage with a hypnotist who ‘places’ him in a room with no doors or windows. The description of being in such a room and believing you couldn’t get out was very compelling. The fear and panic easy to empathise with and yet what the hypnotists reminds the character is something we should be aware of in life:

”The walls of the room are in your mind they are not real”

We’ve all seen similar examples - they truly believe they’re in a locked room, just like we truly believe all the things we tell ourselves: I can’t, It’s impossible, They don’t, They won’t etc. I gave an example in an earlier blog about how I transformed my running by changing the script.

We just have to remember that sometimes we’re simply hypnotising ourselves, or being hypnotised by others. It’s not based on reality. We’re just playing out a script on the stage.

What scripts do you need to change?