Presenter from Canada...
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Mike Mandel is due to visit England in 2008 to present a master class for Eos Seminars Ltd. Dr. Mandel is the president of Brain Software, a company which works at the forefront of teaching hypnotic language patterns, communication skills and advanced thinking techniques.
Typically, Dr. Mandel has covered the following information on his equivalent workshops in Canada, in approximately the sequence that's listed here:
Day One:
Morning session:
Introduction / Open Frame
• Get outcomes from all participants
• Preframe weekend
• Warm-up and Calibration exercise
• Rapid inductions:
• Catalepsy as Leverage
• The little shelf
• Single finger catalepsy
• Delevitation induction with apposition of opposites
• Hand clench induction
• Kinaesthetic ambiguity
• Hand-shake interrupt
Lunch
Afternoon Open Frame - Q and A
• The Direct Paradigm
• Testing Suggestibility
• Trance Ratification
• Convincers
• Direct Inductions
• Braid Method
• Elman Induction
• Gibson Induction
• Shock Inductions
• Trance Deepeners
• Flooding
Closing Frame / Q and A
Benediction
Day Two:
Morning Session:
Open Frame / Q and A
• Working with Metaphor
• Isomorphic Metaphor Creation
• Multiple Nested Loops
• Amnesia in Metaphor
• Locking the cellar door
• Metaphors from personal experience
• Unconsciously generated metaphor
• Working with clean states
• The therapeutic session as a nested loop
• Severing trance
• Hypnotic hangover (trance residue)
Lunch
Afternoon Open Frame / Q and A
• Advanced Therapeutic Methods
• Mandel Method of therapy
• Agreement equals Installation
• Checking for artefacts
• Basic Ericksonian Paradigm
• Content-free therapy
• Stembo Method of trance as a catalyst
• Ideomotor signals
• Installation and dealing with problems
• Art Gallery Technique
• Fear of Flying
• Performance Anxiety
• Pain Management
• Glove analgesia and anaesthesia
• Submodalities
• Direct suggestion
• Reframing
• Dissociation
• Distraction
• Amnesia
• The Mandel Method of Forensic Hypnosis
• Avoiding FMS (paramnesia)
• The Esdaile State
Closing Frame / Q and A
Final Metaphor and Benediction
Enrol here
Date: 29th/30th November 2008. Location: Bournemouth, UK.
Learn more about Dr. Mandel |
Q. How did you get into hypnosis?
A. When I was about 12 or 13, my Dad was concerned I was watching too much television. He took me to a bookstore in Toronto and let me buy any book I wanted. I got The Key to Hypnotism by Walter Gibson. I devoured it and went out looking for a “volunteer”. A friend of mine by the name of Wayne Gibbs was my first subject, and to my amazement, I was able to create anesthesia in his fingertips and jab them with pins. That got me started, and I reconnected with Wayne, 40 years later. He was amazed that it had all turned into a career for me. I read a huge number of books and began doing hypnosis shows and demonstrations back in 1975. Eventually, I hooked up with NLP Canada, where I am now, and then I did the American Institute of Hypnotherapy courses and began working on my doctorate in the 1990’s.
Q. Do you still do the stage shows?
A. Yes, but not as many as before. I think I’ve done somewhere around 5,000 performances, including 5 university tours of the UK and 4 tours of Australia. Stage hypnosis is the least of it for me though. I’m much more interested in teaching. I’ve seen some very poor hypnosis demonstrations over the years, and the sort of training where people are just taught to read scripts at each other. I think trance work should be much more elegant and fluid than that. That’s why I hooked up with you, Kerin. I read your brilliant Language Pattern Bible and listened to your recordings and was naturally very impressed by your skill. I remember thinking that you were someone I’d like to work with. I’ve done lectures for the National Guild of Hypnotists, in Canada and the US, but until I connected with Eos, my only strategic alliance has been with NLP Canada. I’m very picky indeed who I’ll align with.
Q. What do you think of the current interest in hypnosis? It seems to be everywhere; on television, in magazine articles, etc.
A. I think it’s a blessing, although a mixed one. On the positive side, it’s helping to raise awareness of our incredible art and science. On the downside, it’s unfortunate that there are a lot of people teaching and practicing hypnosis, at least in North America, that are unecological or simply inept.
Q. What’s your hypnotic specialty?
A. At the risk of sounding arrogant, I don’t have one. A number of years ago, the Toronto Chapter of the National Guild of Hypnotists asked me to do a guest lecture. I agreed, and was then asked what I’d like to speak on – rapid inductions, metaphors, catalepsy, whatever. I said it didn’t matter, only because it didn’t matter. It’s all the same to my unconscious mind. You see when people realize what superb hypnotists they already are, then their techniques will reflect that certainty. Saturation is important though. You must put a lot of material into your unconscious mind in the form of book learning, practice, varied experience, poetry and literature, etc., that it can use as schema and draw from as needed. That’s one of the things that makes it easy to do good trance work: Give your unconscious a good storehouse of knowledge. When Erickson used to say “That reminds me of a patient I once had…” he was often designing a metaphor on the fly, because his unconscious was a veritable treasure trove of experience and learnings.
Q. What is your approach to hypnotherapy? Are you still practicing?
A. I no longer have a private practice. I retired in 2000 to teach and lecture full-time, other than a trip to Australia to work with a multi-millionaire rockstar. Prior to that, I had a practice in the upscale Beaches area of Toronto. I didn’t do weight management or smoking cessation. I worked with a lot of phobias, anxieties, chronic grief, PTSD, OCD, depression, hypnodontics, obstetric hypnosis, pain management, and a lot of ADD and ADHD kids sent to me by a pediatricianatToronto’s Sick Children’s Hospital. My approach was always fluid, and I’d often trust my unconscious to make up new techniques on the fly.
Q. Can you give us an example?
A. Sure. On one occasion I was dealing with a surgical nurse who had a tumor in the hepatic duct, which leads from the liver to the gallbladder. Bile pigments had backed-up into her bloodstream and she was very jaundiced. This caused her calves and shins to itch terribly, and she would scratch them raw, especially at night. She didn’t want to take sleeping pills as her liver was already compromised, so I put her in a trance and turned the itch down as much as her unconscious would let me. Then I moved the itch from her shins to the bed itself. She experienced the itch as external now, and scratched the bedding which allowed her skin to begin to heal. On the next session, I reinforced my work and had her change beds with her daughter. She still experienced the itching, but it was now in another room, and far enough away that she didn’t need to scratch at all and could sleep peacefully. I think even Milton would have approved of that one! On another occasion, I was working with an ADD kid. Our model states that ADD isn’t attention deficit. It’s actually the opposite: too much attention. EVERYTHING grabs their attention! They don’t daydream or enter learning states very easily. Because of this, it can be difficult to get an ADD patient into a sufficiently deep trance to work with them. Well in this case, the young boy had come in with his mother. She explained that some evenings at 11 PM he’d be roaring around upstairs, riding his tricycle indoors or bouncing a basketball at high-speed. Then things would go quiet, and she’d discover him in bed, fast asleep. She said she didn’t know how he could sometimes shut down so quickly. It turned out that she’d never actually asked him, and I got her to do so. He explained that when he’d get in bed, if the cat was on the bed with him, he’d lie still so she wouldn’t leave. Then he’d suddenly wake up and it was morning. With that explanation, he gave me the means to induce an altered state that could be converted into a deep trance. I drew his attention to the photograph of a calico cat on the bookshelf, that belonged to another therapist. I got him to stare at it, then close his eyes and pretend it was lying on his lap, and he instantly went cataleptic. Hypnosis really can be that easy. In fact if you’re working too hard, you’re probably doing something wrong.
Q. So is your approach Ericksonian?
A. I use a Neo-Ericksonian approach that combines the Milton Model language patterns with a more direct methodology. In my practice, I also utilized Time Line Therapy ™, John Grinder’s NLP/New Code, and EFT.
Q. What are you doing currently?
A. I do a lot of corporate work; mostly keynotes and brief workshops, and I’m still teaching for NLP Canada, where I’m the Advanced Ericksonian Hypnosis Instructor. I also consult to hostage negotiators and police trainers. I like being a “hired-gun” hypnotist. It’s a lot of fun and permits me to travel and do what I love most, which is teaching hypnosis. I’m still involved in forensic hypnosis too, and am in the middle of my third homicide case.
Q. How did you become a forensic hypnotist?
A. I provided a lot of linguistic and tactical communications training with the police throughout Canada and in New York on both a local and federal level. When they were looking for someone to provide hypnosis for major crimes, I was the natural choice as they already knew me. I came up with a method that doesn’t create FMS and is very easy to use.
Q. And you’re coming over to Britain to teach. What can attendees expect?
A. We’re going to cover a lot of material. These days, I most enjoy teaching master hypnotists or at least those who already possess a very high degree of skill. I tend to entertain the group consciously and teach them unconsciously. I mean who wants to attend a seminar that’s no fun? We’ll cover numerous effortless inductions and deepening procedures that I guarantee no one in Britain has seen before. We’ll also discuss some amazing ways to do therapy, like my Art Gallery technique, that’s wonderful when you want to work content-free on sensitive issues. There’ll be a lot of open frame time too, when all questions are legitimate. That’s when we get into a lot of fascinating hypnotic techniques and “inner secrets” that otherwise would never get mentioned in a more structured setting. We’ll discuss the most common mistakes that hypnotists make and the simple solutions for them. I can convey a huge amount of useful information in 2 full days. The fact that the class will consist of experienced hypnotherapists means we can skip the basics and get right into the fun stuff, like ways of working with amnesia. I usually slip this in without warning and make the previous 30 seconds completely vanish. It’s quite amusing. This is very much a “hands on” course and a lot of it is pure installation. I work therapeutically and generatively with the group, opening and closing loops, inserting metaphors, and creating trance on the fly. I love giving hypnotherapists access to my 33 years of full-time hypnosis. For me, hypnosis is like breathing, and nothing makes me happier than seeing students get excited about something new and then add it to their own repertoire. We won’t be sitting around reading scripts or studying notes, although participants are free to make their own. We’ll all be jumping in the deep end of the unconscious together and I’ll show the class how to swim like dolphins…
Q. Weren’t you born in England too, Mike?
A. Yes. I was born in Manchester and we immigrated to Canada when I was four. It’s always great to come home to Britain, and I’m very excited about working with Eos Seminars and Ultra-Hypnosis. I plan on making this a learning trip as well as a teaching trip.
Q. Why don’t you leave us with a helpful hint? What’s “the difference that makes the difference” in order to be an outstanding hypnotist?
A. If I could only choose one, I’d have to say congruence. When you are able to handle whatever the client throws at you, you’ll be congruent in your words, tonality, mannerisms, gestures, etc. And when you’re congruent, you’ll be able to handle whatever the client throws at you. If permitted to add another item to the list, I would certainly say flexibility. A flexible hypnotist is a psychological Aikido Master. He or she is never off-balance or flustered, even when dealing with multiple opponents…
Upon successful completion of this seminar you will receive a Certificate of Attendance signed by Dr Mandel.
Enrol here
Date: 29th/30th November 2008. Location: Bournemouth, UK.
