Last night was the second hypnotherapist peer support group of 2014. Each quarter the group gets together to listen and watch a presentation from a range of hypnosis professionals from all across the UK and beyond. Last night we welcomed American hypnosis professional Sean Michael Andrews, who had flown over from his current base in Germany.

Despite only meeting Sean for the first time yesterday, I felt warmly towards him because several years ago when I purchased a couple of his DVDs and he wrote a personal message to me in one of them (his training DVDs are really good in my opinion, I recommend them) and those kind of little touches make a lot of difference to me.

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Sean happened to be speaking at an event in London a while back and a good friend and colleague was there in the audience and spoke very highly of Sean’s presentation, so I dropped him a line to enquire and see if he was likely to be coming to ENgland again and if so if I might be able to encourage him to come and speak to our group here in Bournemouth. The rest, as they say, is history.

I spent some time with Sean yesterday afternoon and we had a bite to eat together and talked about hypnosis. Perfect. I like to take any opportunity I possibly can to learn from fellow professionals and to discuss, debate and share thoughts. As with many professionals in our field, in places our stances vary, but Sean was so affable and agreeable, it made things very easy for me.

This is something I spoke about with a couple of colleagues in the bar later in the night. We have had some fantastic speakers over the years come here to present to the group. People that differed greatly in styles, stances, theoretical underpinnings, professional leaning and so on, yet one thing all the successful hypnosis professionals have in common is that they are likeable and easy to feel a connection with. Sean is a shining example of this – he offers genuine smiles and laughter throughout all of his communication and it sets up what he subsequently does marvellously.

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We had a great group, a wonderful crowd that had travelled from Belgium, Wales, London as well as our core attendees from Dorset and Hampshire, and Sean began with a group hypnosis session to build expectation, get everyone receptive and used some lovely suggestions for combining new learnings with existing ones. During that session he had identified some people he was going to use for later demonstrations, and we were off. During his talk he spoke about rapid and instant inductions and gave a lot of advice from his vast experience as well as running through the structure of what he had done in the demonstrations.

With demonstrations such as those he was giving for this presentation (i.e. it would be different in therapy), he ran us through his pre-talk, which was done in 52 seconds, down from the usual 58. Surely this is one of the world’s fastest pre-talk educational segments too!

He introduced concepts of a hypnotic hangover and illustrated his hand drop induction explanation with talk of nervous system spikes with instructions to deepen immediately upon creating brief windows of opportunity. It was easy to follow and smoothly demonstrated on one of Dorset’s finest hypnotherapists, Catherine Swatridge.

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The way to remember Sean’s process was simple; Right, right, right, right, left, right.
Sitting on the right of the client, with your right elbow on your right leg and their right hand out, holding with your left hand on their right shoulder to keep them safe and balanced.

Sean demonstrated the hand shake pattern interrupt induction and made it seem smooth, simple (simpler and more effective than many I have seen) and easy to conduct, even though Siva (his demo subject) was a fair bit taller than him. This was also punctuated with some interesting insight to the Spiegel eye roll test and discussion of hypnotisability according to such a test.

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The evening was punctuated with humour, laughter and some lovely anecdotes, those present will surely join me with a grin as we remember references to the lady who offered ‘the pity trance’ to the hypnotist doing a demonstration and the tongue-in-cheek reference to ‘women will fake it’ causing giggles throughout the room.

We learned about table politics, and geography of likely good hypnotic subjects, we learned about pointing our belly button to give undivided attention (with another quip about ‘navel intelligence’) and had another couple of demonstrations. He talked about the best way to deal with skeptical people, in particular those in the media provided some really useful skills and ways to build confidently to achieve hypnotic responsiveness and used some really lovely arm techniques that benefited from repetition and helped Derek seemingly spend some away from planet Earth.

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Then, the finishing demonstration we got to bear witness to the ‘Baby Bunny 4 Hop Induction’ conducted on Lilian whereby a small fear is used as a means of an ‘escape induction’ – something totally new to me – whereby the individual escapes the small fear by going into hypnosis.

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The evening offered much and I smiled throughout. We got to hang out in the bar afterwards and chat some more about hypnosis and Sean very kindly awarded me with his medal of excellence, which I love and am looking at warmly as I write this.

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If you get a chance to train with or watch Sean Michael Andrews, do take it, you’ll be pleased you did. He is exponentially more than his moniker of World’s Fastest Hypnotist might imply and I feel all the better for having met him and had the opportunity to spend time with him. Thanks to everyone who attended last night and continue to support the group, our next speaker will be announced soon. My sincere and heartiest thanks and appreciation to you too Sean, it was a real pleasure 🙂

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