I wasn’t even a hypnotist yet. Was just doing some ‘weird’ fusion type of counselling, which included elements of NLP, some mental Dao exercises and God knows what else - I have many tricks up my sleeve.
I was asked to see a client. He was very agitated and needed to talk to someone urgently, but his doctor was away and couldn’t see him.
‘I want to quit smoking! Now! I hate it! And by the way, I don’t have much time, I have to go pick up my kids!’ – he looked at me as I was that cigarette he was just mentioning a minute ago…
I moved to a different chair and started to talk about his day. ‘Bad! Everything is bad! And this smoking! They even couldn’t make a good sandwich for me today! I threw it out!’ He had this disgusted look on his face. Somehow this sandwich was really troubling him.
‘Oh really’, I said, ‘tell me where this café is, so I never go there myself. And by the way, what was so bad about that sandwich?’
They put CORIANDER on top of it!!! I hate coriander! I asked them for a different one, they just removed the coriander and gave the sandwich back to me!’
I agreed, that this was unacceptable and pretty disgusting… ‘for someone who doesn’t like… and doesn’t want something... That if you don’t like something… and don’t want it…, you just throw it away…, or don’t buy it… because you don’t want to waste your money!’
I went on and on and on. I was so ‘furious’ about that ‘disgusting’ sandwich!
Now we were comrades. We joined our emotions against injustice. We were together in this fight against Disgusting. We were furious about how… the money is gone, how… the health suffered… the body was left hungry and utterly unhappy...
He looked at his watch, it was time for him to go. He got up,and that was exactly when I casually said – ‘you know what? I SEE all these cigarettes you were talking about – they are full of CORIANDER! Some of them might even turn green in your hand! Can you SEE it?’ I was very serious, I meant it.
He froze for a moment, then slowly took a pack from his pocket, threw it to the rubbish bin, and left in total silence…
Would I take this approach if that was happening now? The answer is NO, and I definitely won’t see a client, that has only half an hour to spear on the most important thing – looking after himself…
