Today was going to be the day I wrote a blog showing you lots of photos from my holiday and getting myself back into the fold gently. Next week I’ll share holiday snaps. Instead, I got back from holiday and with the mind space I had, have begun having a Jerry Maguire revolution with the way we sell things on our website.
You see, Jerry Maguire wanted to make things ethical and to be congruent and wanted to uphold principles in the way he conducted his business. Following some discussions with a number of people (my business partner Keith and Kev Sheldrake of Head Hacking fame in particular) we have chosen to transform the way we offer products online.
I want to be able to live and breathe by the principles I promote throughout my work; namely evidence based principles.
So today, I wanted to share with you all, regular blog readers and friends, a notice that is about to go onto the front of our store, along with a change in pricing policy and an entirely transparent, honest approach to how we sell stuff from now onwards. I’d love to hear and read your thoughts. This (following message) will be on our website and anyone will have to read it prior to buying anything from us, and I am going to sleep well at night having it there (and we may well sell a lot less as a result, but heck, we’ll manage) here goes:
Ok, here you are, potentially on the verge of becoming a customer of ours and I guess that by being here you are considering investing in a hypnosis audio download.
Before you do that, I want to attempt to inform you about hypnosis audio materials and I want to tell you about my own personal dilemma regarding us selling these audio products to you here and how to ensure that you derive the most benefit from them if you do buy one.
You see, I pride myself on being an evidence based hypnotherapist. I use evidence based procedures in my hypnotherapy practice, I deem it responsible. I teach evidence based hypnotherapy protocols and techniques and principles on my training courses. I blog about being an evidence based lover.
Then I’d have a student, client or colleague say to me “you know how you were going on about evidence base the other day? Well how much evidence is there for your Wealth Wizard audio programme?”
I did not have an answer. I still don’t. Some of the audio programmes we sell here have no more than anecdotal, subjective evidence and success stories from other people, some of which may have simply occurred due to the placebo effect…
“Wait a minute, how is he going to sell us these audio programmes if he tells us stuff like that?”
Well, we made a conscious decision that we do not want to just sell you stuff without any thought or consideration. We want to inform and guide you.
We have been in the online sales business for many years and in that time, we have produced materials that we are not even prepared to charge for anymore – if you look through our products, you’ll see that some you can simply download for free.
Today, we live in a world that is dominated by apps for phones and so we have decided that if you can download a hypnosis app for a few pounds or pence, then surely it makes sense for people to only have to pay that here too. You’ll notice that almost all of our audio products are for sale for the same prices that you’d pay for a mobile app on your phone or tablet.
Today, my reasoning for us continuing to sell and give away audio products here is as follows, and we’d like to point out some things to you before you choose to spend a penny here:
– In many clinical trials, recordings are used of scripted, standardised procedures, often used to remove variety, tonality and nuance from the researcher for a clean means of measuring the results of the interventions being used. Recordings often get used instead of scripted applications read by a researcher or hypnotist.
It has been shown in numerous studies that results are indeed gained by using audio recordings of hypnosis sessions.
– Hypnosis audio products are no substitute for tailored therapy… Developing a tailored treatment plan specific to your needs is always what I advise first and foremost and in particular for more serious issues.
– Evidence does suggest many therapeutic interventions, those of a Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherapy ilk in particular, are more efficacious with repetition. We do not wish to promote any ideas that you can achieve results with a single listen to any of the audio tracks we sell here.
In my hypnotherapy professional consulting rooms, when tasking clients with processes to practice at home in between therapy sessions, I give my clients recordings. Most evidence based clinicians and academics refer to giving clients recordings (either of the session, or a pre recorded version) to practice and develop their skills, advance the effects of the intervention – you are strongly advised to repeatedly listen to the recordings and engage with it and it’s instructions in order to derive the most benefit.
– Hypnosis recordings can also enhance hypnotisability. By that, I am referring to the idea that the more you listen to a hypnosis recording, the better you are likely to become at using hypnosis and potentially, the greater the benefits could be.
In the 1980s, Nicholas Spanos and colleagues developed the Carleton Skills Training Programme which underwent great scrutiny and has featured in a great many journal articles and research pieces since.
Proponents of the programme gave clients and research participants recordings to use in between real-life sessions and was shown to improve the participants responsiveness to hypnosis. This further enhances the advice that you listen to a recording repeatedly to derive the most benefit.
In particular systematic desensitisation, mindful exposure techniques, cognitive disputation processes, mental rehearsal techniques and the kinds of mental imagery processes that feature within my own audio products are all shown to improve success rates with repetition. As a hypnotherapist, I cannot work with clients daily to apply such repetition (and it would be very expensive to see any therapist daily for a number of weeks!). Recordings are considered essential by many hypnotherapists, including myself, as a result.
– Many of the programmes you can buy here are full-on information products with supplementary hypnosis sessions, they are more than just pure stand alone hypnosis tracks. We do not wish to give the impression that hypnosis is a panacea that simply requires you to listen to it and then a lightning bolt fires from the sky and all is changed.
Coaching skills, thinking skills, self-improvement skills, coping skills, relaxation skills, success strategies and self-hypnosis are shared and taught within these audio tracks, more than just offering up hypnosis as a panacea. These require you to engage and you are advised that in order to develop the most benefit, you’ll need to be an active participant in many of the sessions.
– All the above said, many of the sessions we offer lack evidence beyond subjective and my own professional experience.
Like I said, it is a cross to bear for me as an evidence based practitioner: We think that these audio sessions also help introduce people to my beloved field of hypnosis and it is my hope that many people explore this field more as a result of having discovered hypnosis here… Plus we get a LOT of amazing reports about the results… Perhaps some of the tracks are well disguised placebo? In fact, I’m sure they are.
Over the years as my own stance on the importance of evidence has developed, we have removed entire products from this store. Many we continue to update, and though lots of them have evidence to support them, some do not.
Please consider this when you think about investing. We want to be honest with you and with ourselves, we do not want your money at all costs, we want you to have some exposure to this field, to find benefit from it and understand why we enthuse about it so much.
Some of this that I have written is going to have put you off, I know that, but I sleep better at night as a result.
We have been active online for many, many years now and within that time, my approach has changed as I have developed, explored the field and adopted my stance as it is today. I teach my hypnotherapy students the importance of staying up to date with developments and current knowledge and it would be crazy if I was doing the same things today as I was 15 years ago, wouldn’t it?
However, because we have been online for all that time, there are contributions I have made, articles I have written, audio programmes sold and opinions stated that are simply not in line with the hypnotherapist I am today. If you see such or if anything strikes you as in any way incongruent, then please get in touch with me and we’ll do what we can to update and ensure it is in line with who and how we are as an evidence based hypnotherapist of today.
Please take on board these points that I have made in order to derive the most benefit from any audio you may buy here and I wish you the very best with it.
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I am off to enjoy the Bank Holiday weekend here… I am filled with vigour and energy following my holiday and we have exciting plans and projects on the horizon that I can’t wait to get my teeth into and what’s more… I’ll also share some holiday pics next week. Until then, toodle-loo.
