Hypnosis storytelling

A Life in Storytelling.

© Copyright 2009. Robin Manuell http://hypnoticstorytelling.com

Edited transcript.

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A Life in Storytelling.

Edited transcript.

A Master Class in Hypnotic Storytelling. Part 1 A Life in Storytelling. Edited transcript. Robin Manuell and Igor Ledochowski. Edited by Caleb Williams and Margaret Manuell These interviews were originally recorded for Igor Ledochowski's “Masters of Hypnosis” Series. If you wish to share this with someone - Please direct them to http://hypnoticstorytelling.com where they can download the audio and transcripts for free.

© Robin Manuell ideasinmotion.org.uk All Rights Reserved

© Copyright 2009. Robin Manuell http://hypnoticstorytelling.com

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A Life in Storytelling.

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Biographies

Robin Manuell has been a storyteller since his teenage years. With a background in theatre and psychology he started practising NLP and Hypnosis in 1996. His adventures have taken him all around the world in search of teachers and inspiration for stories that change minds.

Igor Ledochowski is a Master Hypnosis and NLP Trainer and the best selling author of “The Power of Conversational Hypnosis” and “The Deep Trance Training Manual” In ten years he has single handedly transformed the teaching of hypnosis on line and in the process he has trained with and interviewed most of the greatest minds in the field.

© Copyright 2009. Robin Manuell http://hypnoticstorytelling.com

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A Life in Storytelling.

Edited transcript.

A Master Class in Hypnotic Storytelling

Listen to the whole series.

The Power of Conversational Hypnosis.

Discover the Science of Persuasion © Copyright 2009. Robin Manuell http://hypnoticstorytelling.com

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A Life in Storytelling.

Edited transcript.

A Master Class in Hypnotic Storytelling Contents

Biographies. 1. A Life in Storytelling. a) Summary b) Edited Transcript c) Stacked Realities 2. Two Travellers. a) Edited Transcript 3. Storytelling in Performance. a) Summary b) Edited Transcript 4. First Steps in Storytelling. a) Edited Transcript. b) Summary

© Copyright 2009. Robin Manuell http://hypnoticstorytelling.com

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A Life in Storytelling.

Edited transcript.

Edited Transcript

Igor: Welcome to http://streethypnosis.com/

I'm here with Master

Hypnotist, Robin Manuell from http://hypnoticstorytelling.com

Robin is a particularly exciting hypnotist I've had the pleasure of working with before. He's probably one of the most creative people I know and one of the people I've learnt more about storytelling from, than any other hypnotist I've ever met. This guy is a true genius of hypnotic storytelling.

So I'm really looking forward to this interview because there are some very interesting stories and tales that are going to come out. So first of all let me welcome you Robin. How are you doing?

Robin: I'm great Igor. Thank you very much for inviting me and for such a generous introduction.

Igor: Well I'm very excited because as I say, I've had the pleasure of working with you before, we're going to have some very good times here …

© Copyright 2009. Robin Manuell http://hypnoticstorytelling.com

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A Life in Storytelling.

Edited transcript.

So given this is an interview with Hypnosis Masters, this is the whole purpose of this interview series: I'd like to start off by just getting a little bit of your background.

I know you have an unusual background. You started off as a storyteller in the arts and then moved into hypnosis. Could you give us a little bit of background into that side of you?

Robin: Thank you yes. I know we were talking about this the other day and it really got me thinking of, I suppose a moment where I felt like I discovered what the secret was, the essence of real storytelling and why it was the most powerful thing for you to learn to do.

Picture if you will, you're standing in a park, it's an English summer evening. There's a slight breeze blowing through the trees and you're looking out at this natural amphitheatre surrounded by a fence. At the bottom in the middle there is what we call in England, a Folly.

This building was built in the Regency Period. It's called the Royal Spa and it used to be a Bath House. Now all that's left is five Roman pillars in front of a façade.

If you looked at it in passing you might very well think “What a great place that would be to stage an open air theatre show” © Copyright 2009. Robin Manuell http://hypnoticstorytelling.com

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And indeed that's what's going on because this is the first night of a show. We're doing a play called “The Tempest” by William Shakespeare and there's a little bit of tension in the air right now.

Everyone's basically done all they can to prepare. The lights and the sound are being set up. If you look behind the façade you can see a group of actors warming up and I'm standing there by the gate looking at all of this activity and looking up at the sky and I've got two questions going on in my mind.

The first is, “Is it going to rain?” and the second is “Is anyone going to come and see this show?”

I should go back a bit because a few months before I was working in an office and I don't know if any of our listeners have ever had to do one of those Mac jobs. You know, where you're just basically putting in the hours. I'm in my early twenties and I'm working part time in this office.

I'm photocopying, doing peoples wage slips, making sure the company's emergency support vehicles are working properly.

This is a telecommunications company and they sell switches, but you know these machines are so complicated they don't work. So of course you have to support them, you have to keep maintaining them and when they break down you have to send somebody out to fix them. © Copyright 2009. Robin Manuell http://hypnoticstorytelling.com

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We're doing this. I'm doing this job but I've got this quite nice arrangement because the woman I'm working with is called Sharon and she's a singer and what she does with her spare time during the day- I say spare time of course it's company time ...

She's on the phone all the time ringing up record companies and producers. I swear she has Elton John's producer on the phone one day. She's sending off little cassettes in jiffy bags. I'm there and I'm running this theatre company; I'm working in this place part time and she's looking the other way while I photocopy the posters, work out the budgets and it's really interesting actually that point in time.

I'd always known that I wanted to start a theatre company. I came down to Brighton to study at Sussex university to do a psychology degree but all my life I had been involved in theatre and I'd been fascinated with stories.

I think if I go back I realise that its probably when I was about 4 years old my mum taught me to read and I became an obsessive reader.

I read everything that you could possibly throw at me and I graduated very quickly to reading my mum and dad's books. My mum was working as a librarian so she was feeding me these books. I probably read more than was good for me at the time!

© Copyright 2009. Robin Manuell http://hypnoticstorytelling.com

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Just to give you an example, I remember once when I was eight years old being asked to go and stand in front of the class by my teacher Mrs Soar.

It was reading time so everyone was reading their books and she was calling people up one by one to read in front of the class, just to test how they were doing.

I got up to read and I walked up to the front and I was really quiet and a bit embarrassed. I started reading and the thing was, I was reading a book called “The Odessa File” by Frederick Forsyth- I don't know if you've come across that book?

Igor: Great reading for children right! (laughter)

Robin: Yeah and I'm reading a page where basically the hero of the book, our killer, is waking up in the morning and going down on his girlfriend.

Igor: How old are you at this point?

Robin: I'm eight years old. I'm reading this book in front of the class and becoming more and more embarrassed and shy and hiding away © Copyright 2009. Robin Manuell http://hypnoticstorytelling.com

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and at the end of it Mrs Saw turned to me and she said, “Robin I don't think you need to read in front of the class any more.” (laughter)

It's funny but I learnt such a lot about the world from stories. It seemed to me that stories were just as important as history. I read about Winston Churchill and I knew he was a real person but to be honest, Robin Hood and Odysseus were bigger heroes and a bigger influence on my life than some people who inspired me in real life.

I always had this fascination with stories and I think I hid in an ocean of stories. Growing up it meant that I had lots of “Scooby Doo” moments. I call them Scooby Doo moments. You're watching a film and the two characters go “Urh, I know, let's split up and go in opposite directions!”

And you go NNNooooooooo! No don't do that! Haven't you watched any horror movies before? Don't you remember Scooby Doo?

That's always when people start getting kidnapped or

killed!!”

It seemed to me that I'd already learnt so much about relationships and just how the world worked from reading stories.

© Copyright 2009. Robin Manuell http://hypnoticstorytelling.com

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The other strand in my life was that my Mum is an actor and my Dad is a musician and they both have a love of learning that they taught me very early on. Right from the age of 3-4 I was on stage performing. I think I was in my first musical when I was 7 and I started to play the trumpet.

I grew up always acting, being in shows, getting involved in directing them. My brothers and I would put on shows for our parents. I guess a lot of people did that. It's something that maybe isn't as common now that TV is available but that was an experience that was important in our early life.

I knew really early on that I was going to start a theatre company and that my brother would get involved in that theatre company too. That was part of his story. That was part of what he was going to do, he was going to come along and join in.

And sure enough he did.

I came down to Brighton to do psychology and I read three books which really influenced me.

The first was “Impro” by Keith Johnson and I know that's one you've got a lot of time for...

Igor: Absolutely © Copyright 2009. Robin Manuell http://hypnoticstorytelling.com

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Robin: It's a classic in the history of theatre and of psychology, I think, personally.

Igor: It's a work of genius. I learnt more about the unconscious in that book than from most texts on hypnosis and psychology.

Robin: You've got to get it if you're reading this. If you haven't read it, that's certainly one to go for.

The other thing that I studied in great detail was psychodrama which was created by Joseph Moreno. He originally started working with prostitutes in Vienna and he used theatre techniques but used them to help them tell their story and to deal with some of the situations of violence and abuse that they were going through.

He had this idea that ... in Greek drama, Aristotle wrote that when watching a tragedy the audience goes through a catharsis. That's how theatre works. We share in this experience of the story and through that we're changed . Joseph Moreno was interested in how the performer changed and how that catharsis could take place in them as well.

© Copyright 2009. Robin Manuell http://hypnoticstorytelling.com

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The third book that I read that really inspired me was a book called “The Way Of The Actor” by Brian Bates. Brian Bates is a psychologist - probably the foremost expert on European shamanism and its history and he wrote a book called “The Way Of The Actor”. He worked at RADA for a number of years and he proposed that the way of the actor was the way of the Shaman and a lot of the techniques and activities that actors use in theatre were techniques that were equivalent to dramas that would have been used by the Shaman.

I'd been messing around with this stuff in workshops and getting some amazing results.

There was a real core in this theatre group that was built out of creating a safe space where people could learn from each other and from their mistakes and have a good time doing that.

I was doing all this bodywork, meditations and guided visualisations, encounter group procedures just as part of our training and I would start to notice things. I remember one day this guy … I can only describe it like this:

He looked like he was standing a foot too far to the right. We were standing in a circle doing some exercises and I went over to him and I grabbed hold of his shoulders and I moved him a foot to the left. His whole body relaxed and tension that he had in his

© Copyright 2009. Robin Manuell http://hypnoticstorytelling.com

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face just suddenly disappeared and relaxed and you could see his whole body adopt a new shape after that.

I remember something else that was a bit more obvious in a way. The guy playing Romeo was away, he was at class, he couldn't do the rehearsal and there was this teenager, really shy. I thought he was probably a good actor. I had an intuition and I said, “Hey why don't you just read in this Romeo part for us today?”

We were doing the scene where Romeo and Juliet meet for the first time and I got them dancing. I've always found if you get a man and a woman touching comfortably to begin with then it makes it much easier for them to talk to each other.

So I had them dancing while I was talking to them and I put my hand on his shoulder and I said:

“Ok, listen, Romeo. You're a teenager OK? You are just shot through with adrenaline and hormones and you keep falling in love with every girl you look at and you've done it again. Juliet, you've seen her across the room and your whole body is raging with that desire to get to know her and to touch her and to communicate with her and here's the thing. She feels exactly the same way. And listen, if you look around here at all these guys, these braggarts carrying swords. If she's got a choice between one of them and a sensitive guy like you who's got feelings and is not afraid to express them then who's she going to choose?” © Copyright 2009. Robin Manuell http://hypnoticstorytelling.com

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We played through this scene a few times and this guy started off a bit awkwardly but its amazing how quickly he got into it when Juliet started to respond back. I said to Juliet, “Come on, flirt it up a bit, give him a bit to respond back to” and very soon this guy just went off. I swear by the end of the rehearsal period we had to tie him down at parties cos he was snogging everyone! (laughter)

He'd discovered his own power. Suddenly, through getting to play out that power on stage in a different role.

Igor: That makes a huge amount of sense and you know the charming thing I always find about your work - and this is a great example of it again - is you like to use the patterns as you teach them.

This is a great example of the power of stories told in a fantastic set of stories. It's the way that people would change, the way that it effects people without having to think about it and that's the key thing isn't it? This is something that is very hypnotic, and we'll come onto how you do your hypnosis or how you got into hypnosis in a moment but what I really love about the way you do storytelling is it gets to change without the conscious mind interfering with it.

© Copyright 2009. Robin Manuell http://hypnoticstorytelling.com

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It becomes more magical or more trance-formative because it reaches deeper into someone and for want of a better word, something more genuine gets to come out that way.

Robin: I think that's absolutely right. Its fundamental, for me. What this all comes down to is that through being creative and through being authentic you get to tell your own story and you know …

I told this story for myself - I was going to start to run a theatre company and it had come true! My brother had come down to join in with that and we'd created this event.

The first time we did this show ... We did an open air show for the Brighton Festival and it pissed down every day and the weird thing was people came to see it anyway!

I don't know whether it's a British thing, but they brought umbrellas, they brought blankets, they were determined!

“No, if these people are prepared to perform in the rain then we will watch them! Its the great British spirit! Remember the war!”

Igor: Yeah that's Britain!

© Copyright 2009. Robin Manuell http://hypnoticstorytelling.com

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Robin: So the papers loved it. They had pictures of us performing in front of a sea of umbrellas. It became a great story in itself and this was interesting because when we added up all the pennies and we thought about what we'd done, we thought well, what if we did it again and it doesn't rain, How good would that be?

We thought, we'll play along with the paper a little bit. All the pre-press was “Were you there? On that night when it rained last time and everyone got totally soaked? Is it going to rain this time? Will you be there? Will you bring your brolly? Will you bring your picnic? Will you need your sun tan lotion?”

We used to rehearse this show in the middle of a park and people would be passing and we were just in that place having a good time. We would chat to people and I think it made people curious to see what was happening.

As soon as we had that little thing with the umbrella show... Now this is really powerful because at this point the audience become part of the story. It's no longer just about the particular show that we're putting on: it's about the fact that you went the other night and you couldn't get in because it was so crowded.

Or do you remember that night when a fox walked across the stage and stole something from someone's picnic basket?

© Copyright 2009. Robin Manuell http://hypnoticstorytelling.com

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Igor: That's too funny.

Robin: If you see that, if that happens when you're in the audience then you're going to tell that story and its going to become part of the mythology and the history of that community you're creating around you.

I remember one year there was a heckler who was really drunk and the audience literally become part of the story by sitting on the guy. There were two off duty police officers in the audience. They came, they arrested him. I swear, it's the first time that a policeman arriving on the scene received a standing ovation from the audience.

Igor: That's too funny. (laughter)

Robin: When it was over everyone just turned back to the stage. The musicians who'd all jumped on top of the guy as well, went back to their places and started up the music and the show carried on.

So I was sitting in that office working with Sharon and running this theatre company. I remember one day Carla came into the

© Copyright 2009. Robin Manuell http://hypnoticstorytelling.com

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office.

Edited transcript.

She would always come and pretend she needed

stationery. I knew she was coming to flirt with me.

She'd come in and she was standing there. She looked out the window and she looked at the sun, and she said “God, I wish I was out there. I don't want to be in here.”

I looked at her and something clicked inside me. I thought, “You know what? neither do I. I don't have to do this any more.”

I turned round and I picked up my coat and my jacket and I walked out of that building and that was the last time I worked for anyone. I've been self employed ever since.

I walked out of that office and I walked into the sunshine and into the park and that was why a few months later I was standing in that balmy summer evening listening to the wind in the trees wondering if it was going to rain and wondering if anyone was going to turn up.

As I stood there and waited, slowly the first trickle of people began to appear. I could see the actors back stage pretending to hide, peaking out now and then to see how many people were coming. The night was slowly beginning to draw in to a lovely twilight. We're by the sea here so quite often we get lovely orange and purple and pink sunsets.

© Copyright 2009. Robin Manuell http://hypnoticstorytelling.com

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The sun was setting behind this façade and people were turning up. Before you know it I was suddenly standing in a sea of a thousand people. My pockets were stuffed with ten pound notes and twenty pound notes because the cash-till I'd brought was just too small to contain the amount of money, the amount of people coming through the doors.

I just thought, “This is fantastic we've done it again” and I realised that the essence, the real magic of storytelling was this buzz.

It was this community that had grown up around our telling stories. Somehow the story really came to life just at that moment where the audience arrived. It's not the words. It's not the structure, it's not the props, it's not the costume. It's that buzz that you create inside, that you communicate out to other people.

That's where storytelling is at its most powerful and most compelling. It's why you only have to think of the stories of Jesus, Mohammed, or the Buddha to understand how powerful a story can be in terms of what it can change.

Igor: I've got to say, that is one of the reasons I love working with you and the work you do in particular because you put a lot of soul back into these processes. A lot of people get carried away

© Copyright 2009. Robin Manuell http://hypnoticstorytelling.com

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thinking, “Oh, I need the next technique, you put this little clever thing in and it becomes the ultimate persuasion pattern”

What you do is interesting. You have all those things but you're much more interested in what's behind that, the vibe that's created. I think you said it in the middle of your stories and at the end: the interactive nature of it. How you pull people in and make them part of that experience.

Just to point out to the people listening to this right now. How much more do you get a sense that you really know Robin after what, just 20 minutes of him telling a couple of stories?

How many people do you meet and twenty minutes later you feel that you really know this well. This is the power of stories. It's not just telling a story because you're going to win and manipulate and get the outcome whatever it is but because it grows something between the two of you.

It's the storytelling equivalent of... hypnosis is something that you become rather than that you do to someone. It's a vibe people respond to and this is one of the reason I love working with you Robin. You really get that and you really create a powerful vibe with people.

© Copyright 2009. Robin Manuell http://hypnoticstorytelling.com

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Robin: Thank you. I think certainly when I'm working with people that's what I want to see coming back from them: that authentic power. You can tell they're really in the moment and in flow and being the best they can be.

Igor: Well this is definitely one of the reasons why your hypnotic storytelling coaching program for hypnotists is such a fun program to do. We'll talk more about that later. What I want to get into a little bit is your foundations, your starting point. We can tell you're a great storyteller and you've got the credentials. How did you get from that into hypnosis, how did you become a hypnotist?

Robin: I guess the truth is Igor, I was something of an accidental hypnotist. Having got to this position when I was quite young. I was 25 in 1992 when we did “The Tempest”. We had forty people. We had two companies of people doing shows all over the place and I guess that was a lot of responsibility.

There are things that happened that I didn't have the strength or maturity to deal with.

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For example a woman during the course of an exercise we were doing uncovered a memory of abuse. Unfortunately I was in a relationship with this woman at the time as well as being the Director of the play she was acting in and I just didn't know how to deal with that. I realised that I was messing with things that I really needed some guidance with.

At the same time I hit a bit of a wall with the theatre company. I'd been doing this for years, I had a lot of experience but I also had to trust people and I had to motivate people for reasons other than cash. I had to give them space to make mistakes.

I feel the reason that company worked was because I was good at teasing out the story of the people in it: where they'd been, where they were now, where it was they wanted to go and making what ever experience and learning they had as part of our enterprise a step in the direction they wanted to take.

But you know, sometimes it went wrong and I got the can. I remember one day when a friend of mine, an actor, ten years older than me, very experienced turned up.

The stage had been set in the worst possible place that you could imagine in a patch of grass on a traffic island in the middle of an estate where nobody ever left their houses.

© Copyright 2009. Robin Manuell http://hypnoticstorytelling.com

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There was a cycle track across the front of it and nowhere to plug in the lights. I turned up, everything was supposed to have been done.

My girlfriend was having a psychotic episode. Her parents were down in town trying to find her. This actor stood in front of me and she launched into the most blistering attack on how this was all my fault and my responsibility. I understood that she was upset and I could understand why and I realised that she was right, that to be really powerful I had to understand something that I didn't yet.

So I went on a journey to find some teachers.

Igor: And who were the teachers you found? Your inspirations, your mentors. You've seen some pretty good hypnotists and worked with them. Can you share some of that part of your journey with us?

Robin: I started doing the whole workshop circuit and joining a few cults and did encounter group experiences because I figured, if you were looking for teachers you might as well find as many as you could.

© Copyright 2009. Robin Manuell http://hypnoticstorytelling.com

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In

1996

Edited transcript.

somebody

told

me

about

Neuro-Linguistic

Programming. And I eventually signed up for a course and went to see Dr Richard Bandler stand up and start telling stories.

I immediately fell in love with this idea because having my background in psychology and computer models, the model of the brain that NLP proposed and the way that they used it I found very satisfying. It made sense to me and at the same time, I'd heard that these guys had learnt to do magic. That's what I was experiencing in my day to day life and I wanted to find out how.

I did my NLP training and certification with Bandler, McKenna and Breen and I dived in to read and to study as much as I could about the field. I kept going to workshops and trainings and I discovered that I'd been an accidental hypnotist.

In the theatre work I was using guided visualisations all the time and now I was able to incorporate what I'd learnt formally through hypnosis training and apply it much more skilfully than before.

Igor: This is the interesting thing, for me. We've talked before and shared stories and you've been telling some very interesting stories here. The fact is that you are doing something that people should really understand. Hypnosis is prevalent in everyday © Copyright 2009. Robin Manuell http://hypnoticstorytelling.com

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society. People are doing it all the time without really realising it. You were doing it in a pretty profound way which is why you started doing it overtly just to catch up with what you were already doing anyway!

I really want people to get ... it's easier to do hypnosis than not. So you might as well get good at it and forget about can I put this person into a trance? It's more a question of, once I've got them in a trance what do I do with it to make it worth-while... right?

Robin: Absolutely and intention is all. It was interesting because as I was going through this process of learning hypnosis I had a friend who was utterly, utterly against it and would challenge it in every single way. I had within me this real determination to do right because when people start learning these skills and when they have a desire for power you know, that can be wrong. I was very concerned that I didn't want to do wrong with my own power, I guess that I was afraid that I would.

So I studied with various different teachers and Richard Bandler was someone who inspired me a lot but I became very doubtful about some of his methods and of course the fact that the guy is either a murderer or a liar does have something to do with it.

People make mistakes. That's ok. Some of the most powerful and authentic communicators out there, influential people, are © Copyright 2009. Robin Manuell http://hypnoticstorytelling.com

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influential just because they have made those mistakes and because they are prepared to stand up and talk about it. If you think about AA and many of the self help and support groups that are around. Many of those are lead by people who have been through an experience and therefore can talk about it authentically. It's that authenticity that is at issue for me here.

I don't think we can ignore people's personal history. We can respect and honour the gifts that they do have but let's not draw the blinds completely behind these things because there's a reason.

I was also a bit concerned that there's a suggestion that if you weren't careful and you were using these very powerful unconscious installation patterns things could go wrong, you know: you could not tie off the end properly or you give people suggestions that aren't ultimately for their own benefit because you're imposing content, you're imposing content on them a lot of the time and you hear stories about people, you know, catching diseases or getting bad habits that the people they modelled have.

So I thought, well I'll go and study with John Grinder and find out what he has to say. One of the things that I liked about NLP was you could go straight to the source. I know that you talk about it as a subset of hypnosis. I call it high-tech hypnosis when I'm talking to people because that's nice and simple.

© Copyright 2009. Robin Manuell http://hypnoticstorytelling.com

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Igor: I would agree and I think that more NLP people would become better at what they do if they realised the incredibly strong hypnotic element that the whole discipline demands.

Robin: I think its important to realise that John Grinder and Richard Bandler made this stuff up and look how powerful that story has become.

Igor: Exactly (laughter)

Robin: You know as you're listening to me now you've probably noticed that I'm a little more hesitant talking about this, and there's a good reason for that, because in my search and my desire to find a teacher and to find some kind of moral compass for my own behaviour what I ultimately discovered was that I couldn't find that compass outside of myself.

When I was working with John and he was good enough to supervise me and support me, he was very helpful when we first met and I got to a point where I hit my own ethical boundary.

There was a situation where we were working covertly with a woman. Her family wanted to help her but this woman herself © Copyright 2009. Robin Manuell http://hypnoticstorytelling.com

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didn't know that I was being brought into the family, specifically to change her situation. I realised that I couldn't in conscience allow someone to come to like and trust me on the basis of a lie.

And so I reached this point where I realised I wasn't going to find that moral compass outside of myself and I had to start looking inside myself and getting back to that authentic voice that actually I'd had as a young man. My journey had left me richer and wiser but I still needed to reconnect with the passion of that young man who had an important story to tell.

Igor: You know this is something I think is really important and again something I admire about your work. I really want people to get this. This interview with a master hypnotist is here for a reason and its not just to learn techniques, although that's kind of interesting, to expose people to a wider range of hypnotic ideas and so on which I think is also very important but one of the key themes that comes up over and over and over again and I've seen a lot of Master hypnotists out there and I've trained with them to have their skills, right?

And the story's always the same, which is you learn at the feet of someone else, some one who has great skill and understanding and the rest of it and they've gone down that path and at some point, they have to make a break or they'll never be a master.

© Copyright 2009. Robin Manuell http://hypnoticstorytelling.com

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They have to decide for themselves, this is where my path is, this is the direction I am going in, this is why and these are the ideas that I've been taught that I don't necessarily agree with but I can respect them. It's where you decide, “I'm taking control of this process now”.

I've learnt, I've got my training wheels out. I've had my experiences and now it's time for me to shine through rather than me to try and pretend I'm someone else or copy them and try and fill those boots again. I'm going to fill my own boots for a change and I personally can't overemphasise that element. You more so than many people, really get that don't you?

Robin: I would have to agree its a very powerful moment

Igor: That's part of where the power of a hypnotist comes form isn't it? Your ability to say, this is my way. That's part of the authenticity or the power of hypnosis, and there is power in hypnosis and it's not the language - it's not the clever tricks. Its who you are, and if you're not being yourself, if you're not being all of who you are, well then you're selling yourself short and you're selling the people around you short.

So let's take that idea a step further. We've got an idea of your storytelling background which is very powerful. You went into © Copyright 2009. Robin Manuell http://hypnoticstorytelling.com

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hypnosis initially to understand the power that you developed by accident and to be able to control that better. Now you've set foot on your own path and you're ready to find your own way and your own moral compass, to decide where you draw your line in terms of what's right and what isn't.

I'd like to explore a little bit more about your ideas around hypnosis. Your philosophy, how it works and, in particular, the age-old debate, or at least the debate since the 60s, direct v indirect hypnosis. Where do you stand in terms of which one to use, which is better, and which path to walk down?

Robin: In my practice when I'm working with somebody and we have arranged to work together then I'm going to use both simultaneously, because I always think it's good to be doing something direct to distract people while you're doing the covert stuff.

I'm sure you've had this situation where you work with someone and you spend an hour doing change work with them and at the end you do the 20 minute formal hypnotic induction and you know actually you've already done the work, this is the convincer at the end, its the money shot!

© Copyright 2009. Robin Manuell http://hypnoticstorytelling.com

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Igor: Yeah it's what they came for... it's “Oh where's the spinning watch? silly me... here's a spinning watch, you're cured - this guys so good”

Robin: Exactly. However I just love the elegance of indirection and I guess that's why I'm so fascinated by storytelling and how that works because it is, I believe, the most subtle and ingenious way that you can begin to weave in the unconscious learnings that are there for people when they listen with the right ear, and the left, know what I mean?

Igor: I know exactly what you mean.

So to summarise this is how I look at it and it sounds like you're in a similar direction.

Direct hypnosis is very powerful and very useful and has a tendency to be very linear. In other words you go after the actual problem. It's gone. It's sorted but there's all this stuff around it which could also be dealt with at the same time but isn't touched. It's like a laser. You take a pot-shot: that's down, that's down, that's down. One of the beauties of indirect hypnosis is it takes the whole. The whole landscape gets changed at the same time.

© Copyright 2009. Robin Manuell http://hypnoticstorytelling.com

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Sure, you're focusing on one thing maybe, stop smoking or insomnia or whatever it is but you're changing the whole landscape rather than the blot on the landscape. Sometimes the blot becomes a feature and it becomes more valuable than the thing they tried to remove in the first place.

Robin: I like that. You're changing the whole holographic picture and one little twist makes everything fall into place in a different way.

I think using indirection and deliberately focused language also enables you with the right degree of pace to direct somebody and while you're directing, respond to what you're learning about where they want to go. Does that make sense?

Igor: Absolutely, and this comes back to the power of stories, particularly the way your method of storytelling which involves the audience. I love that description of, you know, you're rehearsing in the park and people are coming in to watch and you chat to them and as you chat to them the play changes live in the moment because you're including the audience now. By the time you get to present the actual play in front of the audience there's no real fear for the actors any more because they're part of the audience themselves. How can you mess up? how can you not please the audience? If you're part of the audience you have your instincts attuned! © Copyright 2009. Robin Manuell http://hypnoticstorytelling.com

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Robin: Absolutely and as we talk about in the short course, learning to listen is one of the first skills of being a great storyteller.

I was just thinking about that whole background to hypnosis really and how I think about it because I didn't come to hypnosis from this more formal traditional root.

You know I was born in Africa and I have some friends out in Africa whom I go to visit. They live in a place where the nearest electricity cable is about 2 miles away. There's no tellies and at night all there is to do is just sit round the fire.

Every night you'd just begin to sit round the fire. Its called shi kome, the evening fire. You gather the leaves from the shamba and you pile them up. You light them and you begin to burn them there.

You might cook some food in the ashes as you're doing so but shi kome is a time when people step back and the first thing they'll do is they'll have a little glass with whisky, local whisky made from the cassava root and they'll sit there and they'll pass around the glass and they'll talk about whatever has to be done the next day and who needs to do what work...what to do about this nephew or that niece. They'll sit there and they'll just start to tell stories. There's a story about this boy called Owl and picture him if you will. © Copyright 2009. Robin Manuell http://hypnoticstorytelling.com

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Owl is a boy of maybe four. He plays around with the other kids in the village wandering around the forests. He's not quite old enough to join the boys who fish on the lake yet and he's not quite young enough to stay with his mother around the hearth so he runs around the fields and the gardens and he learns how to use a hoe.

That name “Owl” by the way.

We associate the Owl with

wisdom but in this place, Owl is actually an unlucky thing. Owls, though they are wise, they are at home in the dark and they see into the shadows. Because they can twist their head all the way round, they can see both forward in time and backwards into the Greataway.

And the Greataway is this whole space of existence. It's the whole space of everything that could be, everything that has been and might have been. It's the place where imagination, space and time meet and Owl is called Owl because when he was a little boy... when he was a baby... when he was born, they reached inside, the mothers, and they had to twist his head round; and as they pulled him out, and when he was born, and when he stopped crying, he looked up and he looked around and he looked each of them in the eye and so the mothers knew that Owl was a spirit that had been born too early into a body.

If this happens sometimes the spirit remembers the spirit world and yearns to be back there. So the child is very sickly and © Copyright 2009. Robin Manuell http://hypnoticstorytelling.com

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sometimes it doesn't live for very long and dies early in childhood.

Owl had lived through his early childhood and now he was there, four or five years old, and he lived in the village and one day the strangers from a far away town came to Owl and they said, “Owl, come with us to the far away town where we will teach you magic so you can return and be a blessing to your village.”

Owl went to his family and he went to his friends and he spoke to them of this and the next day he came back to the strangers from the far away town and he said “Yes, I will go with you to learn magic that I may return and be a blessing to my village”.

And so before Owl left he took his heart and he sealed it between two halves of a shell he found in the woods and he gave it to his sister saying, “Sister will you keep this heart with you? When I know where my heart is, I will know where my home is.”

His sister took the heart and she put it by the fireplace in the family altar.

Owl travelled to the far away town where he was taught magic. He learnt that we live in the Greataway. The sum total of all that has been and could have been and might have been. All the wishes and the dreams that humans have that can be brought into life. © Copyright 2009. Robin Manuell http://hypnoticstorytelling.com

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He learnt how to walk along the Iffalong and how to see into the space around him in the Greataway. He learnt that the secret was just to close your eyes and see. Begin to see with your eyes open and begin to see with your eyes closed. He learnt to journey along the Iffalong and back, because each of us lives on a certain happen-track, a pathway we choose, it's like the weave of a tapestry or the melody that underpins a song; its just that there is some natural quality inside of us that's bursting to come out; there's a story that you want to tell that's coming from somewhere deep inside you.

Owl realised that you can write your own story and when you do it's a powerful thing. Owl chose to come back to his village and indeed his magic was a blessing to it. People would come to him and he would show them the Iffalong, the places, the choices and the opportunities that they had, and send them on their way, along a different happen-track.

Owl stayed in his village and his magic was a blessing to it but every now and then he would wander out into the forest. You see his heart had gone missing, nobody knows whether maybe his sister was sweeping and knocked it out the door. Maybe a dog found it and carried it away, or maybe the kids used it as a football, kicking it, throwing... it went soaring out into the forest and nobody saw where it landed.

© Copyright 2009. Robin Manuell http://hypnoticstorytelling.com

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But one day Owl was wandering through the forest, when he spotted Fox and Fox said to owl. “Owl I found your heart and I buried it deep in the forest where no harm can come to it. A few weeks past I wandered through that place again and from the seed had grown a tree and from the tree the sound of a baby crying was heard.

Owl went back to his house and began to think about the little seeds he'd been planting.

Now, you know, when we close our eyes. When we open our eyes, we have this gift, this wonderfully fertile imagination.

You know Igor, we've worked together in the past. I could just turn to you and begin to describe a landscape rolling in front of us, with yellow sun dried grass and you'd be able to look at that and to imagine it in your mind and I know you'd then be able to take that and you'd be able to begin to describe it on and to take it further.

Our imaginations can create whole worlds round us. Indeed our world, our whole world, if you look around you right now the chances are that everything you can see was an idea before it was a thing.

© Copyright 2009. Robin Manuell http://hypnoticstorytelling.com

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Everything, even if you're standing in the middle of nowhere, chances are that landscape had been changed and altered by humans mining, humans farming, humans working that land.

And this is such an important discovery because when you realise how powerful ideas are to change the world and you realise how powerful you can use stories to convey those powerful ideas then the world is your oyster. I've taken you away again - have I returned back to earth, Igor?

Igor: Robin all I can say is you're a genius. I love the way you tell stories. I love how much you can pack into a story. Everyone who's listening to this, go back and listen to that story again.

You'll hear so much in there it's unreal. This is one of the reasons I say, you are the master of hypnotic storytelling. I have not come across anyone who comes even close to what you can do. Its fantastic and this is one thing that you focus on in your hypnotic storytelling coaching program. You teach people to tell stories like you do. It's a very powerful process.

You take all the experiences you had in the theatre and honestly I don't know how you do it but over a phone call you can tease the same power out of people that you obviously have in

your

stories and that's just a work of genius I am very proud to have

© Copyright 2009. Robin Manuell http://hypnoticstorytelling.com

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had a chance to work with you and consider you a friend because you do some amazing stuff Robin,

Robin Thank you very much it's a pleasure.

Igor Before we come to the end there's one last question I'd like to explore briefly and then we can wrap it up and we'll tell people a little about how your hypnotic storytelling coaching program works. I'm sure they're curious and the question I have is you know we've got a good understanding of your hypnotic philosophy even though I defy anyone to put it down in writing. We get more of an intuition about it more than anything else which is exactly what you want us to have.

There is something I think is important for any master hypnotist which is: what are the limits? Why does hypnosis fail sometimes and what do we do when it does? How do we make it work when it falls apart?

Robin: I think that is a very important question and any good hypnotist is constantly going to be challenging themselves on those very cases where, “Damn, I didn't get a result that time.”

© Copyright 2009. Robin Manuell http://hypnoticstorytelling.com

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It's always great when we can notch up another hour long session that cure somebody's phobia; send them out into the world feeling more optimistic about life or connecting really powerfully with what the story is that they have to tell; but we've all come across that experience where you know it's not working and you now it's this general thing, ecology. The ecology isn't right.

I started to appreciate that . . .

Igor: Can I just interrupt you? For people who aren't familiar with NLP and what that term is .. could you say a little bit about what ecology is before you come towards the solutions?

Robin: Well think about it. Someone comes to your office. I had a guy come to see me with a fear of blushing. He was afraid of blushing. He was embarrassed that he was about to start blushing and then of course when he was blushing he was embarrassed about that so he became even more embarrassed and got redder it was just a nice loop he had himself caught up in there.

I did him some relaxation exercises and did some very simple work with him hypnotically and sent him on his way.

© Copyright 2009. Robin Manuell http://hypnoticstorytelling.com

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Well, sure enough he came back to me the next week and he said, “Oh yeah I had a great time. Yeah, great. Thank you very much! I didn't feel embarrassed about talking in public at all. I was at a quiz night and I shouted out a couple of things and everyone laughed at me ..” (laughter)

You see what I hadn't counted on was the guy was an idiot and said inappropriate things in public. (laughter)

When you work hypnotically with people, when people come to you with a symptom, one specific thing that they want changed often you need to think about the wider context in which they have this behaviour and realise that it might serve a purpose.

It's when I started to look into that broader picture and particularly into what it was people had in common when they repeatedly failed to make changes for themselves. These were people who'd been to this hypnotist and that therapist… and it became obvious to me that there was a bigger story being served by their failure to stop.

This isn't new. Berne talks about, for example the wooden leg game where somebody is just presenting all these things that are wrong with them. You present solution after solution but they can always think of a way that won't work. This is their game! This is how they get off - on you failing to help them!

© Copyright 2009. Robin Manuell http://hypnoticstorytelling.com

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But it became obvious to me that people set these really powerful stories quite early on in their lives that then have control over them.

I'll give you an example - this guy I worked with who was a drug addict. I asked him when he first knew he was going to be a drug addict. He told me that he'd decided when he was 14 years old, and he'd written this verse on his exercise book, a rhyme about how he was going to smoke pot and take heroin all the time.

This guy recovered this memory in a hypnotic trance. He was thirty five years old and he'd forgotten that he'd told himself that story! Why did he tell himself that story? Who knows? It wasn't a very useful one for him, but he was that powerful that he could make it come true.

One of the things that has really impressed me about you, Igor, is that we've known each other a few years now and I know that you've set yourself this journey that you wanted to go on and certain things that you wanted to make happen and you've gone out and achieved those things and it's been great to see you do that. You're somebody who had really been authentic in living the life you want.

© Copyright 2009. Robin Manuell http://hypnoticstorytelling.com

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Igor: Thank you I appreciate that. Just to reiterate something that you said in closing. This is an attitude that is so incredibly powerful for hypnotists and I want to pull it out so people don't miss it.

Clients aren't weak, they are massively powerful. The bigger their problem is, the more messed up they are, the more power they actually have to maintain that. If they've defeated all these people, it's not that there's no help for these people it's... this person has such an amazing capacity. We just have to redirect it. We just have to tap into it and use it as a force for good rather than ruining their lives as they've been currently doing.

At that point being a hypnotist is a tremendous pleasure because you are working with some amazing abilities and I think that's a great attitude for people to have. You clearly have it and I would encourage people to adopt it and tell themselves a story about the power that people have and the power you have as a force for good.

You're surrounded by powerful individuals. Even the most dull individual must have an immense capacity to shut out every semblance of a personality to the outside world! That takes an incredible amount of skill and determination to do it constantly so that no one can catch them out, I mean that's nuts!

© Copyright 2009. Robin Manuell http://hypnoticstorytelling.com

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Robin: It reminds me of something. I work a lot with artists and performers and I was talking to a couple of artist friends the other day and they both really surprised me. They were quite contemptuous of the people who liked their stuff!

It was like, there's a particular someone out there who they want their artwork to appeal to. It's probably an imaginary person who runs an imaginary gallery in London somewhere. Because they as an artist are not confident enough to say, yes this is good. They can't acknowledge that their audience have taste! Does that make sense?

Igor: Absolutely! It's crazy but it's true, isn't it?

Robin: I think it's one of the first thing you have to do as a human being, as a story teller. When people turn round and give you compliments and like what you do. Get used to saying “Thank you that's great.”

Igor: This is something that I really like about your storytelling coaching program for hypnotists. You have a really good way of getting hypnotists to tell themselves a more powerful story about their own power and about their own ethics - about their own © Copyright 2009. Robin Manuell http://hypnoticstorytelling.com

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ability to be a force for good in the world. You do it in a way which makes it fun! You really engage with the energy of what storytelling is. Those of you who are going to listen to the next seminar interview in which we get into the storytelling aspect a little bit more in detail. You'll really hear Robin shine as a coach there; and this is something I think which marks your work out and this is one of the reasons that I really want people to see your work more.

There is a vibrancy to your hypnotic stories. You're not just reading it from a book; you're not just choosing a fairy tale or putting on a sing-song voice.

Those things have their place and they can be very useful and have great impact on people, but you go that extra mile and that is something I really want people to get.

Robin: This is what I'm listening for and looking for when I work with somebody; it's that moment. It's something I have a really keen feeling, the moment when somebody is really owning what they are doing and it's powerfully connected to the emotional power behind it.

Igor: If you want to hear more about that you'll have to hold on for the rest of the interview which happens next week ha ha!! (laughter). © Copyright 2009. Robin Manuell http://hypnoticstorytelling.com

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Robin, we could be spending hours; in fact I know we've spent hours talking about these things and its a shame that this particular interview is limited in time as we come to an end. I do encourage

everyone

to

check

out

Robin's

website,

http://hypnoticstorytelling.com

Do listen to the next interview where we go into the actual art of storytelling. You'll hear some storytelling coaching happening live. In the mean time all I've got left to say is Robin, thank you so much for coming onto the call with us and having this interview. I've really enjoyed it, I'm sure everyone else listening here has enjoyed it immensely so thank you for that.

A Master Class in Hypnotic Storytelling

Listen to the whole series.

© Copyright 2009. Robin Manuell http://hypnoticstorytelling.com

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The Power of Conversational Hypnosis.

Discover the Science of Persuasion

Published 2010, Brighton UK

© Copyright 2009. Robin Manuell

© Copyright 2009. Robin Manuell http://hypnoticstorytelling.com

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