The Ideomotor Effect relies on small, unconscious motor movements caused by the person’s thoughts. These small movements are exaggerated by a weighted pendulum hanging from a chain (Normally 10cm or longer). A minute movement of the finger will lead to a larger movement being made by the pendulum. These micro movements in the finger can be further exaggerated by additionally anchoring the elbow on the surface of a table as you will also have any mico movements in the forearm/arm contributing to the effect (This technique is demonstrated in Confident Future Hypnosis Training Courses). Importantly, the person holding the pendulum must be holding it with minimal tension in their hand/fingers as even the slightest amount of tension will interfere with the micro muscle movements.

Now, you’re probably thinking: But how on earth does a thought create unconscious motor movements? Let me give you some examples: Have you ever started thinking about one of your favourite foods and started to salivate? Or have you ever mistaken a stick that looks like a snake and jumped back in surprise? These are both examples of the Ideomotor Effect. Simply put it when something imagined leads to a movement that happens without thinking about it.

So what a pendulum allows us to guage is whether the unconscious mind is in agreement (YES), or disagreement (NO), when a certain idea is focused upon. Interestingly it is often possible to guage from the movement of a pendulum what someone’s Unconscious Mind is thinking, even if consciously they are confused and unsure of their answer to a question.

With the theory explained I wanted to share what I would normally say to a client before I used a pendulum with them. Keep in mind that a pendulum would normally only be used in specific circumstances and nearly always at the end of a session so it assumes a strong rapport. I would normally pre-frame using the pendulum by saying:

In a moment we are going to do a process together that uses a pendulum. Now, I don’t want you to think that this is voodoo or witch craft. This is a process that uses a phenomenon called the Ideomotor Effect. The basic premise of the Ideomotor Effect is that when you hold a thought in your mind there are tiny changes in the muscles in your body. Those tiny changes in the muscles in your body can be exaggerated by the pendulum so even if your fingers only move a tiny amount we can see that movement more clearly through the pendulum. We aren’t connecting with anything but your Unconscious Mind and this process is easy, simple and quite fun once we get going with it. (Then I would follow the Pendulum Script, setup a Yes and a No signal with the Pendulum and conduct the change work)

Hopefully this blog article has been helpful and allows you to have a greater understanding for how and why a pendulum works. If you have questions or would like further information then please leave a comment below.

Further reading:

1. The Ideomotor Effect Explained (UK Skeptics)
2. Ideo motor response (Wikipedia)

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In January 2011 we started getting together as a small group of just 3~5 members and since then we now regularly attract 7+ members. Our meetings are informal and happen on a monthly basis. It is totally free and hosted in Bull Creek, a short walk from the Murdoch Train Station. If you are reading this and you are interested then you are most welcome to join us at our next evening! For full information about the next event it is easiest to join the Perth NLP Practice Group on Facebook:
» Find the Perth NLP Practice Group on Facebook

So far we have covered topics including:

• Hypnosis Inductions
• Chaining Anchors
• Clare Graves Values Levels (Spiral Dynamics)
• Parts Integration (Also known as Visual Squash)
• And much, much more!

So what are you waiting for? If you are interested in NLP or Hypnosis and you live in Perth then join the Facebook group and join us for our next event!

» Find the Perth NLP Practice Group on Facebook

If you have any questions or would just like to have a chat with someone before you come along then feel free to give the organisers a quick call:
Alana: 0415 879 100
Lloyd: 0427 384 547

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Recently she shared with my by email some of her top tips for staying on track once you’ve quit and I thought they were worth sharing.

Once you have stopped smoking, make sure you have a strategy to keep on track. Some tips:
• Never ever doubt your decision! Always remind yourself that no matter what happens, life is always going to be better as a non smoker. There is nothing in a cigarette that can help you with anything! So as a smoker, you have been harming yourself with absolutely no gain. Stopping smoking is like stepping out from under a grey cloud that has been hanging over your head for years.
• Avoid coffee, tea and alcohol for the first three days, and drink lots of water. This will help calm any jittery nerves you may have, whilst speeding up the healing process in your body.
• Change your thoughts. If you have a ‘smoking thought’ – think about something positive instead, such as ‘isn’t it great to be free.’ Practice this technique regularly.
• Keep a journal. Reflect on and write down your experiences every day. This will help keep you focused. After the first three days, you’ll feel a lot more relaxed and positive, and you’ll also feel more energetic. Realise that you are in the process of physically recreating your body as a vibrant, healthy non-smoker, and write down your experiences in a journal.
• Breathe! Deep breathing is a great way to reduce tension and as you take deeper, slower breaths, oxygen floods into the small airways in your lungs. This is literally a breath of fresh air! So take three deep breaths several times a day. Here’s how: Place your hands over your stomach, with the fingertips touching. As you take a deep breath, feel your fingers separating. The oxygen is now getting into the deeper parts of your lungs. Feel how easy it is to breathe now that you are once again a non-smoker.
• Get moving, even if it’s only a walk around the block. This will release endorphins, the ‘feel good’ hormone and you’ll come back refreshed and relaxed.
• Stick to a well balanced diet. Enjoy occasional treats, but make sure you are also giving your body the fuel it needs to function properly, and don’t skip breakfast.
• Take a mini mental holiday, using the power of your imagination. Close your eyes and relax. Now imagine you have stopped smoking for a year. What does it feel like? Create vivid mental images and make them as realistic as possible. Notice how healthy you look, and how great you feel, and how clean everything smells, and all the things you have bought with the money you have saved. Use all five senses to create your own incredible future!

Download the full PDF: Going It Alone Article (2 Page PDF)

As with everything, there aren’t any guaranteed rules for what will definitely work (or not work) for you. What is vital is that you take charge of living the life that you want and do whatever it takes to make that a reality. Living at Cause is the key to all lasting change, remember that post from May last year: If you make your bed you have to lie in it!

» Read more about Stop Smoking Easily on Jenny’s Website (She is based in South Africa).

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A Trance Induction recorded by Lloyd Johnson

You can download this for yourself and put it on your iPod if you want:
» Click here to get the MP3 file (Right click, ‘Save As…’ to save a copy to your computer)

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Personally I tend to experience it through my sport, when I’m writing, when I’m teaching and normally when I’m with clients. I’ve also experienced it in the past when playing computer games, doing timed tests and while with friends over a coffee. What gives me a heads up that I am experiencing Flow is when I notice a distortion of time (Things moving much faster/slower than I realised) and losing track of my basic needs like eating, drinking or going to the bathroom.

Mihály Csíkszentmihályi suggests that there are ten factors that are likely to accompany an experience of flow:

1. Clear goals (expectations and rules are discernible and goals are attainable and align appropriately with one’s skill set and abilities). Moreover, the challenge level and skill level should both be high.
2. Concentrating, a high degree of concentration on a limited field of attention (a person engaged in the activity will have the opportunity to focus and to delve deeply into it).
3. A loss of the feeling of self-consciousness, the merging of action and awareness.
4. Distorted sense of time, one’s subjective experience of time is altered.
5. Direct and immediate feedback (successes and failures in the course of the activity are apparent, so that behavior can be adjusted as needed).
6. Balance between ability level and challenge (the activity is neither too easy nor too difficult).
7. A sense of personal control over the situation or activity.
8. The activity is intrinsically rewarding, so there is an effortlessness of action.
9. A lack of awareness of bodily needs (to the extent that one can reach a point of great hunger or fatigue without realizing it).
10. People become absorbed in their activity, and focus of awareness is narrowed down to the activity itself, action awareness merging.

Interestingly, not all of these factors are needed for flow to be experienced.

Mihály also suggests that fundamentally there are certain areas of life that people are likely to most easily achieve Flow:

• Sports or competitions where you are playing to win.
• Gambling or situations where there exists a high degree of chance/risk.
• Mind Altered States, especially those induced by drugs.
• Escapism, such as through drama, the theatre, TV, DVDs or a good novel.

Early this year when I was explaining this to a client they summed it up nicely by saying, “So basically shouldn’t we try and spend as much of our life in Flow as we can then?”. And I tend to agree. The more of my life I spend in Flow, the happier I tend to be. And if you think about it, Flow is the exact opposite of Anxiety or Worry.

In what areas of your life do you find yourself experiencing Flow? How could you increase the feeling of Flow in your life through slight changes to what you already do but by applying these factors?

Want to read more? Check the book out on Amazon by clicking here.

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As you may know I am a passionate amateur Triathlete. When I signed up for this crazy sport I looked at the distances involved in the races and wondered how I was going to do it. What I didn’t realise was that I would travel so much further than any of those distances many, many times in the lead up to each and every race. What I experienced was that doing the training didn’t come down to my physical ability very often, what it came down to was my ability to manage my thoughts. My success over endurance distances I would say is almost entirely down to my ability to manage my thoughts during the long training sessions. And what I found is that my thoughts followed a specific sequence when things were going well, but also when things were going badly.

Take Cycling for example. One of the regular rides is a Sunday morning ride where we head to the Perth hills for a 90~110km cycle. Now I’m not sure if you’ve ever ridden a bike much but if you have you may be aware of the impact a hill can have in your performance. What I noticed is that on the up hills I would fatigue easily, find myself struggling and find my cadence (Speed I turned the pedals) really drop, even if I were in an easy gear. While on the down hills it didn’t matter how hard I had worked getting up the hill, how tired my legs were or what gear I was in – I could always find some extra umph to keep those legs powering along. So I began to wonder… what is it that makes the difference? What I found, for me at least, is that I have a really different voice in my head when I’m going up a hill. The u phill voice is a nagging voice that is talking about how far it is, how tired I am and how heavy my legs are feeling. Yet, when I’m going down hill the voice in my head was an exuberent and childish ‘wheeeeeeee’ that left me feeling full of joy, with loads of energy materialising from nowhere. Woah… so here came the moment of truth… What would happen if I used that childish downhill voice on the uphills?

Find out in my next post…

ONLY KIDDING! What I found is that suddenly I was getting similar results from my legs on the up hills. Now, I had to trick my mind by changing what I was seeing too. I’d focus on the front forks of the bike seeing not much besides the bike, the road and the curb. But it worked, just by mindfully creating that down hill voice I was getting co-operation from my legs that previously I could only have dreamed of.

So I thought, how do I get the most of this in the other sports I enjoy? How do I trick my mind in the harder situations so it behaves like I know it can in the easier situations? And what I found is that just by paying attention to my self talk I was getting similar improvements to the ones I had with my cycling in my running, my swimming and my sailing.

So what is Self Talk? Self Talk is that little voice in your head. If you say to yourself your 7 times tables… Yep, it is that voice! Now your Self Talk changes based on the content it is sharing with you. It may be in your voice, it may be in the loud encouraging voice of your coach or maybe even in the discouraging voice of a parental figure. And the voice probably has specific words based on the situation. Are they dis-empowering words like “You’re not good enough” or are they empowering phrases like “You can do it” or “Wheeeeeeeeeee”. In fact, it is core to the story of The Little Engine That Could (Click for YouTube video in case you’re unfamiliar with it).

I promised something from this post that could apply for yourself, and here it is:

• First, you need to come up with two situations within the same sport (Or any activity really). You want one situation to be disproportionately hard compared to other situations in that sport and you want the second situation to be disproportionately easy compared to other situations in that sport.
• Then for each situation you would want to ask yourself: “When you think about that situation do you have a picture? And are there any sounds that are important?”
• Now focus on what the sounds are, you may want to write this down. What words (if any) do you hear? Is it your voice, or the voice of someone else? Is the voice loud or soft? Is the voice talking quickly or slowly? Does the sound come from any direction in particular?
• Repeat the previous two steps for the second situation.
• Now you need to work out what is the difference that makes the difference? Is the voice different? Are the words different? Is one quieter or softer than the other?
• Now, and this is the final step, see what happens when you use the Self Talk from the easy situations when you’re physically in the hard situation. Do your results change, or not?

So there you have it, a quick intro to the power of Self Talk in the context of Sports Hypnosis. Hope that your results are as useful as mine have been so that you may improve your performance with a just little tweak between the ears. If you found this post useful please drop me an email, a Facebook message or leave me a comment on the blog and I can post more in this domain.

Update: In the few days since posting this information I’ve already heard back from someone that has had great results. Here is what they had to say:

“Just had to tell you how much you impacted my life Lloyd. I took your advice with the running and thinking of it being easy, like running downhill. I Never cud run hills at all. Today, run up and down 2 different hills 7 times….and it was easy. Love your work. WOW” - Karen, Queensland

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If you’re interested then you can prove this to yourself with a little experiment.

Go and buy yourself a nice long strong plank of wood. Say 20m long and about the width of your foot. Then lay that plank of wood out in your driveway. With a little bit of practice you’ll probably be able to walk safely from one end to the other with minimal effort. Now take that same plank of wood. And instead of laying it in your driveway how about you suspend it between two tall structures, such as trees or between two buildings. Now notice how it would be different. Going to walk along the plank up high in the air is a world apart from walking along it in your driveway… Yet, the plank is the same, the task is the same.

So what causes the change in your reactions? What happens is the changing of the location of the plank has created a suggestion in your Unconscious Mind, a suggestion of falling. The idea of falling is coloured with all the emotion your mind can muster as your Unconscious Mind’s highest purpose is keeping you safe. Without even thinking about it your Unconscious Mind has accepted the suggestion of you falling and is acting as if it is true – it will take control of your body, give you shaky legs, make you want to desperately go back and more. You wanted motivation? This is extreme motivation from the Unconscious Mind!

While Logic tells you that surely it can’t be that hard? You walked over that very same board not so long ago… But the more you think about it logically the more the suggestion of falling is aroused by your Unconscious Mind. Sure, you could stubbornly persist, but it wouldn’t be an easy or pleasant experience for most of us.

The same is true each and every time that we try and force ourselves to do something with Will Power! If you remember just one thing from this post let it be this – making changes by Will Power alone is equivilant to violence against yourself. Think about it…

As the French Autosuggestionist Emil Coué famously said, “We can now see that not only is the will incapable of vanquishing a thought, but that as fast as the will brings up its big guns, thought captures them and turns them against itself.”

Hypnosis and Neuro-Linguistic Programming provide an excellent means for programming and communicating with the Unconscious Mind. They can succeed at avoiding this conflict between our ideas and our will to make lasting changes. These techniques in no way devalue one’s “will power”, it merely relegates it to its proper place.

Personally I love how quickly changes in Values (What drive Unconscious Motivation) can totally turn a client’s behaviour around.

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• Light Trance: Critical faculties are put on hold.
• Simple Trance: The client manifests the appearance of a deep trance but internally is merely compliant with suggestions.
• Deep Trance: The client actually experiences the suggestions as reality.

Both Light and Simple trances can be induced in a relatively short time. On the other hand, Erickson recommended an initial period of three to eight hours for training a subject to into a deep trance! Results will vary depending on your client, it is the time that it takes them to learn to go into trance that will decide on the time involved as much as it will rely on your skill as a Hypnotherapist.

So how do the levels of trance differ?

In Light Trance it is normal to comfortably experience:

• Lethargy
• Relaxation
• Eye Catalepsy
• Arm Catalepsy
• Catalepsy of isolated Muscle Groups
• Heavy or Floating Feelings

In Simple Trance it is normal to comfortably experience:

• Smell and Taste Changes
• Number Blocks (Where the client forgets numbers)
• Amnesia
• Analgesia (No Pain)
• Automatic Movement

In Deep Trance it is normal to comfortably experience:

• Hallucinations (Positive)
• Bizarre Post-Hypnotic Suggestions
• Anesthesia (No feelings)
• Negative Hallucinations
• Comatose
• Somnambulism

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Sales

A common example in Sales could be something like this:
“Are you looking for a car today? (yes) You’ve probably decided on whether you want a small car or a large car? (yes) And you probably want to see a car that is good value for money? (yes) Would you like to see this new BMW we just got in?”
Or if you were selling a service, such as Business Consulting:
“Is quality important to you? (yes) Is your time important to you? (yes) If you could be making more profit would you listen to someones suggestions? (yes) Great, then could we make an appointment to discuss what we could help you with?”

Hypnotherapy

In a Hypnotherapy setting is extensively used in trance inductions and the setup of suggestibility tests. For example a Hypnotherapist may say:
“To begin with I want you to stand up (yes), stand with your feet apart (yes), take a big deep breath (yes) and then close your eyes and go into a deep, deep trance (suggestions).”
The client is much more likely to accept the suggestion to close their eyes and go into a deep, deep trance if the Hypnotherapist has first installed compliance using a Yes Set.

Parenting

You’ve probably already started to get the idea, but here is an example for a parent who wanted their children to go swimming:
“The sun is shining, it’s warm, it is such a beautiful day, let’s go swimming.”
As you can see with this example it is not strictly necessary to have the other person say “Yes” in response to each part of the sentence, just for them to end up agreeing with the final suggestion.

In addition to saying the questions that form a Yes Set you are also likely to find that nodding your head while waiting for their answers will increase the effectiveness of this pattern, and the speed at which they answer.

What next?

Yes Set’s occur naturally in conversation and, now that you are aware of them, you’ll probably notice them in your conversations with others and maybe even on TV. As with all linguistic patterns the key is to begin to use them. The more than you use them the easier they will become and the more you will find yourself using them in suitable situations. Enjoy!

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As with any hypnosis, suggestibility tests themselves will normally work much better when they are pre-framed by the Hypnotist. Giving a strong reason for doing the suggestibility test before you start will normally lead to better results. An example of a pre-frame script if you were trying this with friends could be:

Hey, my friend was telling me about this thing where at some level everyone responds to suggestions from the people around them. He told me about this suggestibility test thing where basically you close your eyes and I ask you to use your imagination and it gives an insight into how suggestible you are, or you aren’t. Would you like to give it a go?

If they say yes at this point then continue. Otherwise find yourself a more adventurous friend to try this with. Once you have their permission then you would go straight into one of the tests below.

The Finger Vice

This is one of my favorite suggestibility tests. You can tell how suggestible they are by how quickly their fingers move together. As you run through the script it is a good idea to demonstrate the movements you want from them by doing it yourself.

The script you would use would go something like this:

Please take both your hands and interlace them together firmly like a fist. Now keep your hands in the fist, but have your index fingers outstretched. Keep your fists tightly together and your index fingers about an inch apart. Now what I want you to do is imagine a vice squeezing your index fingers. Imagine a vice pushing in on your index fingers and pushing your fingers together now (And at this point I would be making squeaky noises like I am doing up a vice). Tighter and tighter, really feel the pressure of the vice bringing your fingers together. That’s right.

And that is it! Some people who are really suggestible will have their fingers pressed firmly together from the start. Other people may not have moved their fingers at all. How far they have moved their fingers is your indication of how suggestible they are (The more the better).

The Dictionary/Balloon

This is a common suggestibility test that provides really obvious visual feedback and is good if you are working with a bigger group. You can tell how suggestible they are by noticing how far apart their arms are when you are finished. As with the previous test, if you demonstrate the arms as you do it then they will find it easier to do the right thing.

The script goes something like this:

When you are ready, hold both arms straight out in front of you. Now turn your right hand so it is palm facing down, and your left hand so it is palm facing up. Now close your eyes and imagine as brightly and as clearly as you can a big bright balloon tied by a string to your right wrist. The balloon is pulling your wrist up, higher and higher it is pulling your wrist up. But wait, imagine in your left hand a heavy, heavy, big, fat dictionary. And as you vividly imagine the big heavy dictionary in your left hand feel how heavy and tiresome it is to hold. But the balloon, the balloon on your right wrist is feeling lighter and lighter, pulling your wrist higher and higher… while the dictionary is getting heavier and heavier. And when you’re ready, without moving your arms, open your eyes.

Once again, that is it! Their arms will show who is more suggestible, and those who are less open to your suggestions.

See it in Action

This is an amateur video I found on YouTube of someone doing a basic suggestibility test in their back yard. It is worth watching as it gives you an idea of how easily and quickly this can be done:

What’s next?

You know all you need to know! Go and give it a go with your friends and enjoy the results.

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