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Monastery & Cat Stories 2
Igor: For my next story, there’s a man who’s sitting in a monastery and he’s exhausted, falling asleep. When he wakes up it’s probably about mid-day now because he’s a nervous wreck. The door is unlocked. He finds it’s a beautiful sunny day and he’s walking through this monastery, and there’s a very peaceful vibe to the place.
I don’t know if you’ve ever walked through a building that has that sort of experience, but he gets into this mood and he hears the sounds of monks outside where there’s a little patch of garden where they’re growing herbs and simple foods and so on. There are some monks working there while others are dealing with normal day-to-day routines like mopping the floors and cleaning up and so on.
They all smile and are very friendly, and it feels like such a contrast to the craziness from the night before, but he made a promise to the father abbot, so he contains himself. Curiosity gets him and he can’t help it. The morning stretches out, actually the afternoon stretches out and it starts getting towards evening and the father abbot comes out and starts making the polite noises that it’s time to go now son.
Of course the man full of awareness decides to ignore all the polite noises that are being made and pretends he’s not getting the hint. After a while the abbot comes out and says look son, you’ve been here now it’s time for you to move on we’re not a hotel. Get your stuff and peace be with you, enjoy your journey and enjoy your life.
The man is desperate to find out and is using any angle he can get. He says look, I’ve told you my story I’ve been an executive and was close to burning out. My life is falling apart. My boss kicked me out for a month and I’m not even allowed back to work and not even allowed to touch anything related to work.
He said I should go out and find inner peace again and I have to say this place is so peaceful. This is healing to me. This is the best therapy I could have. Please, please let me stay just a little bit longer. This is good for my spirit. Of course the father abbot gets the saddest eyes and expression on his face. He looks at the man and knows what’s going on. He says it seems like you’ve thought about it my son, but remember our rules. You do not leave the room you’ve been assigned and no matter what you hear, no matter what happens, just remember you’re always safe.
Please don’t ask us what’s happening because I can’t tell you, you’re not a monk. You’re not one of us. So the man makes his absolute promise, it’s fine and he’s allowed to stay. He’s excited now. Terrified but excited. He watches the sun lights sliding down the wall in the refectory window as it heads towards sunset and there’s a little ray of sunshine, which is when the monks go to bed.
Notice there’s a curious thing that as the sunshine starts setting there’s a scurrying like people are in a hurry to get somewhere. The first monk, the old man who met him at the door, father Gregory, approaches him and says son the sun is setting it’s time for you to return to your chambers for contemplation and sleep. It is our way in this monastery.
He goes okay, gets back to his cell and tries to go to sleep but he can’t. He can’t do it. Sure enough night carries on and he forgets and starts dozing a little bit away and catching himself. He needn’t have worried because at exactly one minute past midnight the craziest sound reverberates through the entire monastery. It sounds like agony and pain. It sounds like grief and despair.
The man is terrorized. There are shivers going down his spine, a cold sweat breaks out on him and figments of his imagination start to rise and take life of their own. He’s wondering what the heck this thing could be. It reverberates he feels it in his bones. Six hours of this. Eventually the craziness ends and the first crack of dawn lifts above the mountainside and just as soon as it strikes the side of the monastery, silence. Complete peace.
The man is still shaking and terrified, burning with curiosity but terrified. It takes him an hour to calm down and then of course he’s so exhausted he falls asleep.
Robin: I had a nice sleep once. I woke up the next day and I was making my coffee in the kitchen and what do I hear outside my backdoor?
Group: Meow.
Robin: Thank you.
Igor: Integrated storytelling.
Robin: Meow. Meow. Meow. Meow. Meow. Meow. Meow. This cat is back for more. He’s outside the door in the garden. I’m feeling a bit nervous to go in my own back garden, because not only have I got the cat now but then I’m frightened that if I stroke the cat that guy will get jealous basically, is what it amounts too. I’m in two minds.
On the one hand this guy has managed to keep his cat alive for 19 years, which if you know cats is quite a result, especially a diabetic cat. On the other hand it’s an underweight cat, I’ve done the research. The first thing I hear this I go on the Internet and I’m typing away, cat diabetes, finding out and making sure I’m treating the cat right.
I realize I can actually give it some water because they get very thirsty and he’s always licking water from the plant parts and things like that. It’s a bit of a quandary and I don’t quite know what to do. Every time I go back to the kitchen, meow. So this goes on for a bit and it gets quite intense because for a start, at the time, my kitchen ventilator was broken. So whenever I cooked, which is daily because I like good wholesome food every day, I had to open the kitchen door.
I’d open the kitchen door, stick my chicken in the oven and the smells of roasting chicken would start to waft out through the neighborhood, and sure enough it was like I was inviting the cat round for dinner. If you were a cat that’s what you would assume, right? He’s clearly cooking chicken. He’s opened the door for me. So the cat comes in every time.
This guy and his visit round he’s going it’s very simple, you shouldn’t have fed it for a start. Anything you get from now on is your fault, because you shouldn’t have fed it. All you have to do is lift it up, put it out the door and he’ll soon get the message he’s not getting fed again. I’m like okay fine. After 15 times a day I’m thinking, this cats just not getting the message right?
Maybe I’m not communicating with it right, I don’t know. That evening I’m in my house sitting in my living room doing a bit of work. The kitchen is off to the side and I hear a noise. I have a cat flap in my backdoor and I’ve taped it up. I keep hearing the noise. Meow.
The cat is poking its head around the corner in the living. Hi cat, how you doing? I quite like this cat you know. It’s touched my affections. I’m feeling like there’s a little bit of a telepathic connection between us. He knows I like it. He knows I like it really and that I don’t want it to go. I just turn to it and say I’m sorry but you’re going to have to leave. The cat looks up at me, turns around and heads out of the kitchen out the cat flap. Great result!
I’m communicating with this cat, we’re getting somewhere. I go back to the kitchen and tape up the cat flap multiple times. I just lost myself again, I’m sorry I’m being so indulgent. We have to do some…
Igor: Exercises.
Robin: … exercises. Sorry about that. We need to change the energy, change the mood.
Igor: We do.
Robin: You guys don’t want to sit here and listen to us tell stories all day. You have work to do.
Igor: No, we’re in a workshop here. We have to do some work.
Robin: Things to change. Have to get moving. Active.
Igor: What’s all this wasted time telling stories?
Robin: Get some energy there.
Gabe: What happened?
Robin: Nice one Gabe.
Igor: I think what we need to do now is to have everyone stand up and move their chairs to one side and then we’ll come back again.
Story Crafting Exercise
Robin: Let’s move those chairs. Storytelling is a performance skill, like hypnosis. I noticed watching some of you during the week that it was great, even though your subject or client had their eyes closed. Some of you were being really dramatic with your gestures and emphasizing those physical aspects of your communication, which is what we want to do now.
Give your hands a little shake out to warm up a bit. Let your arms come into it. Roll your shoulders a bit. Do you know that sketch on The Big Bang Theory? There’s a bit in that where one of the actresses says to one of the geeks, no just move about, go in the flow, do what comes naturally and the guy is standing there. I am doing what comes naturally. This feels good. That feels weird.
Arms shake a bit. Roll your shoulders. Just give your hips a bit of a wiggle. Come on bloaks, having some flexibility in your spine does not make you gay. Believe me the women in the audience will approve. Nicely warmed up. We’re going to do the first exercise that takes some of the games that we were playing yesterday but approaching it in a different way. What I’d like you to do; you remember the magic box right? You were taking things out of it, if I just passed Igor some thing and if he passed it back to me, some thing back to me. Meow. You get it?
So, find a partner, start taking turns. I will interrupt you and ask you to change partners as you’re doing it, go.
Igor: I think we need a bit more energy in the room so what we’re going to do now is to please walk around the room, point at things and in a loud and magical voice make them exist by telling them what they are. This is a carpet. This is a stage. This is a light. As fast, furious and as loud as you can be, go.
Robin: And stop. This time walk around the room pointing at things and saying what they are not. That’s a lobster. That’s a potato.
Igor: Quick and speedy.
Robin: That’s the sky. As fast as possible folks. Now, this time I’d like you to get into a group of three or four and take it in turns to mime out some action. One of you might begin… very simple. I want the next person to then come in and add something to it. That’s fine. That’s all. Go.
Igor: Off you go. [Exercise starts]
The next one will be quite a lot of fun. In this one you’re going to stay in the same groups, but you’re going to imagine that you’re a cat burglar in the most bizarre and unique museum in the world. There’s stuff in there that you would never expect to see in a museum or in a collectible store or whatever.
You have to somehow clamor over the furniture, the obstacles in the way and the death rays which are very important to miss. From time to time you’ll find an interesting object that you can pass to someone else in the group, who is of course your fellow cat burglar, that has to first get to you to be able to take the object and re-appreciate it.
Robin: You may add in an iteration.
Igor: In other words, you can talk.
Robin: If it helps.
Igor: Off you go. [Exercise starts]
Robin: Okay, so now what we’d like for you to do is to choose one of the stories, preferably one that you’ve gone through that process with and in a minute.
Igor: Sixty seconds is crazy long.
Robin: Tell that story and simply be aware of your physical gestures as you’re telling it. Whatever you do, simply do it bigger and with more exaggeration and force than you usually would. Yes! Go. [Exercise starts]
Igor: Very good. Who enjoyed doing that, hands up? Good. For the next exercise, again get into small groups of two or three people.
Robin: Different people.
Igor: Choose a different story. Whether you’ve put it through this simplification process or not doesn’t matter, you can put it through that now or you can choose one you’ve already done so. A different story than the one you’ve just told. The only thing you’re going to add there now is you let your mannerisms come out normally, maybe accentuate them a little bit not doubling them a bit more than you would normally do.
The thing to focus on is stretching the story out a little bit by giving descriptions of things you can see within it, anything visual. The sunlight glittering on a leaf. Watching someone’s facial expressions. You can make it as well, but describe how the eyebrows came down, their jaw dropped and their fist came flying towards your nose and you didn’t see it coming, until an explosion of stars.
Robin: Colors, textures, shapes…
Igor: Get the idea. Anything visual. Verna, of course, use whatever your primary experience is to create the same experience with other people so use whatever comes to you as the stronger sense.
Do you all understand the exercise? Let’s take a minute and a half each to do that and we’ll come back for another exercise. Different story, different partners. [Exercise starts]
Robin: Fantastic. I’m seeing some great things. I can see the story from way over here. It’s fantastic. What we’d like to add in now is… you can use the same story or a different one, you’re going to change partners and this time we’d like you to focus on auditory descriptions, descriptions of what you can hear.
Igor: You get to include everything you’ve done so far, so you can still use gestures and accentuate a bit more. You still describe things that you’re seeing visual experiences and you can de-emphasize them in terms of putting all the emphasis on auditory, but still have them in there as part of that story. Then lavish yourself on the sound of their voice, barking, the sound of flesh striking flesh. For some reason I’m stuck on that one and don’t know why.
Robin: Meow.
Igor: Get the idea. Let’s give them another 30 seconds… so 2 minutes apiece. [Exercise starts] Off you go. Having fun yes? Good. Are your stories getting better yet? Have you noticed how putting stuff into it starts enriching them? Again, you’re going to change partners or groups again.
Robin: That bits important.
Igor: It is important.
Robin: You need to have an experience of doing this with many different kinds of people.
Igor: Switch your story out again. Have one of the other stories in your repertoire and you still have the body language and visual and auditory descriptions. Now I want you to include the kinesthetic, which basically means emotions, things you’ve felt inside and physical touch the textural things. Is everyone clear? We’ll give you an extra 30 seconds, so 2 1⁄2 minutes apiece.
Enjoy that. Off you go. [Exercise starts]
Robin: That’s great, how was that are you enjoying that still? Some great stories coming out.
Igor: Are you noticing you’re breathing new life into your stories now that you’re putting fluff, filler, but somehow the stories are coming more to life and you start thinking of different things of reference and presentations that are more powerful. Would that be fair to say?
Group: Yes.
Robin: For the next exercise I’m sure you will have discovered that you’ll have been doing this anyway naturally and we’d just like to round off this part of the exercise by emphasizing it and what we’d like you to do is what we call in hypnosis and NLP as synesthesia switches, so you begin with a visual description, then move to touch, then move to sound and then back to visual.
Begin to move and glide between the different sense systems and notice sometimes the change in sense system will take you away to another part of the story. Sometimes it will focus you in on building a rich representation of something that’s right in front of you. We will add another 30 seconds.
Igor: So three minutes apiece.
Robin: You may choose a story you’re working up or use a different one. Change partners again. Fresh partners and off you go. [Exercise starts]
Igor: —
Robin: Off you go.
So, you’ll have probably noticed how, when you change the content you’ll already have noticed the non-verbal elements of your communication are popping out naturally anyway. Just to round off this section we want to add in the final element. You’ll probably have noticed when you’re talking to people and listening to stories that there’s one really important element of how they talk. Because, you can use your voice.
Igor: In some ways they’re very incongruent and in other ways that have a different kind of experience as well.
Robin: You can use speed to punch energy into the situation and zip people up.
Igor: And you can use something else to get energy into them also. Sometimes it sounds like one of these and sometimes it’s just one of these.
Robin: And you can draw people in closer. And you can also use deep voice or high pitched voice. Sometimes I’ve noticed that when you really play around with being completely silly and taking things to the furthest and strangest extreme, when you rein things back in it gives you more choices in just how you use your voice.
Igor: Do you all understand the exercise? Different partners, same or different stories. Three minutes apiece. Off you go. [Exercise starts]
Exercise Debrief
Igor: Welcome back, how did that go?
Group: Brilliantly.
Igor: Who had fun with that, hands up? Lots of enthusiasm. What did you learn from all these things? What did you experience? What surprised you?
Robin: Questions/comments/observations.
Igor: Praise.
Student: I found that even if I told the same story to different people there were different elements that I emphasized for the different people. It felt like they connected and resonated with that more and then I took, like some of the stories I started one way and ended it completely different just because of the people around me.
Igor: Absolutely. Now you understand why Erickson told the same story differently each time. How did you know to do that?
Student: It’s mostly unconscious but I think what I’m doing is that I’m looking at their responses and calibrating it and then feeding it.
Igor: Exactly. That helps right? If you just say I’m going to tell you a story and I don’t care if you like it or not. That’s not useful. If you get a sense of reaction what points to tense, to lean in and what points are like starting to look around the room for a desperate escape, they start padding their pockets for a pocket
knife so they can cut their arms off and leave. Then you know your story needs working on. Well done. Thank you for that.
Student: This is a quick one. I notice when I add in all these different elements my personality changed.
Igor: Yes, or rather you’re getting more of your personality out there.
Student: I’m not myself when I tell the story, so if I have this new personality when I tell the story and then the others see me, then they haven’t met the real me.
Robin: A really simple question. If you’re not yourself when you tell that story who
do you think you are?
Student: I’m a storyteller.
Igor: Very good.
Robin: You’re a storyteller and who is that storyteller?
Student: That’s me. Because I’ve already improved the caliber of my story, now I use more hand signals, movements and I’m so much more aware of modalities and so on. Whereas previously I didn’t use them and I thought that was me, that’s how I talk and people accept me.
Robin: So you’re actually saying you’ve expanded your flexibility and choice and you have new ways of… you have a bigger personality now.
Student: Yes I have a bigger personality, a changed personality now. When I go back I think my wife can’t recognize me.
Robin: There’s a very important point there as well which relates back to something we were talking about before the course began wasn’t it, which is that often our personalities, what we choose to express about ourselves are very much constrained by our environment, our choices, our cultural upbringing and things like this.
We all develop a particular style within that environment. Knowing that you have more choices and that you can be a bigger personality. You can be more flexible in your behavior is a wonderful thing, and there’ll be a process of relating that back to how you are in everyday life as well. As you say, if you suddenly come back and your wife doesn’t recognize you.
Igor: Have an affair with your wife.
Robin: Yeah. Hopefully she’ll enjoy discovering you all over again. And, there are certain environments that you work in, for example, corporate environments and things like that, traditional family gatherings where people have an expectation of you. I’m confident that you’re all smart and subtle enough to find a way to begin to integrate those new choices into that environment. Respectfully enough that you don’t scare other people off and that they have time to absorb the new changes. Also bear in mind that if you’re used to being a certain way. For example, if you’re used to not using gestures a lot or voice a lot, than introducing those elements at the right moment can be very powerful.
Student: I just wanted to say I’m curious about the form of feedback while the stories are being told, something feeling like the urge to provide verbal responses as the story was being told.
Igor: So, as you’re listening to the story as the audience member you actually want to encourage the storyteller by saying oh yes that’s cool. Really? Well do it, that’s what a normal conversation is like isn’t it? You don’t just have someone telling you in a theater you have a person up front talking. In all conversations there are usually signs of encouragement like, no you don’t say. I do say. You don’t say. I do say. And then you carry on with the story a little further and they’ll go really. They go yes really. Yes. These are parts of a normal conversation, so by all means feedback.
Student: I guess it’s also possible to really trance people out when you’re telling the story.
Igor: Well, that would be the idea. This is hypnotic storytelling for influence, so yes after lunch we’ll add the more overt hypnotic elements.
Student: I’m finding that I have a great time telling good stories to people who want to hear them, but if they’re not responding the way I’d like them to I fail in having the right tools to get that kind of response.
Igor: Right. So is your question more about how to get responses of people or more about how to warm them up to give you permission to tell the stories you want to?
Student: Probably the latter.
Igor: I suspect too and we’ll be covering this evening a whole influence formula using storytelling to get the kind of permission we’re talking about and always work at the level of the audience. Sometimes you just start at the first step of the formula and it may not be until later meetings when they allow you to take it further.
That’s a relationship and like every relationship you don’t just walk up into a bar and go oh, you look nice let’s go home and have sex. It’s not a normal relationship and hopefully you realize that right?
Student: It took me some time.
Igor: Like other relationships…
Robin: That strategy works but it’s a numbers game.
Igor: It is a numbers game exactly, which is kind of what you’re describing in some ways. So there is a warm-up act required before that conversation is had and the same is true in business, therapy and all kinds of things. There is a warm- up act. Some people need a longer warm-up act, some people need less but we’ll get into that.
Robin: I have a very simple answer.
1. Don’t tell stories to people who don’t want to hear them
2. That damn crazy cat…
Igor: What?
Robin: Nothing.
Student: Got it.
Robin: Hook. That’s one of the reasons why I like coming up with nice simple catchy
little titles, because you can refer to something and then you can just leave it and people will be… in one of the videos on my blog David Nivens does that, he goes oh yeah no, I kind of got thrown out of the army and well I went to a fancy dress ball dressed as a goat.
Igor: Makes you curious right?
Student: Yes, I’m curious.
Robin: Elicit curiosity.
Igor: Thank you for the question, we’ll talk more about that as we go on.
Student: I was describing a swimming experience and I noticed my heartbeat increased from 65 to 79.
Igor: That’s very precise. So there I was doing the backstroke… no, no, no… that’s it…
Robin: Do you have like a little LED in your eye?
Student: I’m good. I was wondering can you use a story to change your state? Basically, in this situation everybody can stop drinking coffee by just remembering their sport activities.
Igor: First of all, I suspect you’ve already answered your own question. Secondly, there are people, have you ever noticed there are some people whose heartbeat never goes below 100? It doesn’t take caffeine, they’re just nervous and tense all the time, like oh my gosh what if this happens or that happens? They’re high strung. It’s because of all the stories they’re telling themselves constantly.
How is the world?
Is the world a safe or not a safe place?
What has happened to them constantly?
How do they perceive it?
They put themselves in that state through the personal stories they tell themselves, something again we’ll engage in and then finally the hypnotic answer is to recall that Milton Erickson after he had polio at the age of 17 or so, he taught himself how to walk. He was paralyzed from the neck down. He taught himself to move his arms, his legs, his fingers and toes, everything from scratch from zero.
First they thought he was going to die and then they said he would never walk again and now he’s running around walking with a cane and canoeing up and down the Mississippi like a healthy young man. He started all that by the stories he told himself, by remembering climbing a tree and jumping from branch to branch and noticing that there was a response his body was making.
So yes nicely done.
Robin: You’ve demonstrated that you change your state as a storyteller, particularly as you associate into the story right? You’re revivifying the memory in hypnotic terms and if you’re not doing it than why not, because that’s the whole point right, is to make the emotional heart to heart connection, body to body connection and that’s what you’re doing. Well done.
Igor: Very nice. Anymore?
Robin: If there are no more questions or comments specifically I’d like to ask if anyone has some feedback that they’d like to share about what they saw that they really enjoyed.
Igor: In other words, you as an audience member, listening or watching a story being told, what is it about those that you went yeah I like that? Get the idea.
Student: I already gave that storyteller the feedback but I would like to give it to all of you. He’s telling a story about going back to the country where he used to live and meeting his old friends. It was all animated and beyond the words I could already see all those friends and everything. Then he said that his focus shifted inside and he did this with his voice much more, so the next little while he was going on about the reflections.
Then his voice changed and for me it was like okay, now he’s back with the group again. I could really follow that with the voice and then in the end he did the loop back again and he said, I had this moment and that was really amazing.
Robin: That’s great. He’s doing something naturally which we’ll return to in the next session.
Igor: Excellent. You are ahead of the game, very nice. I like that. For the rest of you, you can puzzle as to what all that means.
Robin: Did no one else see anything they enjoyed?
Gabe: I noticed that people who use less uhs and ums and who are able to have more of a flow in their story it’s easier for me to go with that story. It’s the flow that I find and a bit of a logical build-up that helps in captivating my attention.
Igor: Would you like to have a simple trick to cut out the uhs, ums, and so ons, from your story?
Gabe: Yes.
Igor: It’s a very simple trick.
Robin: Deep inhale/exhale.
Igor: That was it. Two versions… so the man was in the monastery on the bed and he’s sleeping soundly kind of, you know… as opposed to so there’s a man and he’s in the monastery. And he’s on his bed. He’s terrified. Does that help?
Robin: It’s okay to pause. An um just means I’m still talking but I haven’t got there yet.
Igor: It’s basically filling sound so that people, because all the ums, you knows, ah and stuff like that is telling people, please don’t walk away yet because I haven’t finished. Have the courage to know they aren’t going to walk away because they’re hanging on a thread going what? Your mannerisms will tell them.
If I go so there’s a man in a monastery, I’m done. It’s strange to end there but I’m done. If I make eye contact and say so there’s a man in a monastery, and you know, he’s got something on his mind. Do I give you any signals that I’m finished yet? So why on earth would you leave? It’s okay to pause. Is that helpful?
Gabe: Yes.
Student: One piece of feedback. I enjoyed it when people looked at me. Some people I found would look all around me as they’re telling their story, but some people looked right at me and when they looked at me I felt more connected to it. The other thing that I enjoyed more was when I got a sense that some people were telling their story and some were feeling their story.
Igor: Yes.
Student: The people who were feeling their story, I got a much better connection to.
Robin: Thank you.
Pamela: I noticed that I was the most engaged by the stories when people were talking to me about something they loved, either a hobby was frequent and then also, people who spoke about their children. Then I would just like to say in opposition to James’ remark that actually one of the things I missed most greatly with my mother was someone who tells me stories who’s not looking at me.
I really like being told stories in a dark room, from one end of the house to the other where a story commences and then a bunch of things happen in the middle and then it continues. All of those are exciting for me, so I don’t necessarily have to have someone looking at me.
Robin: This is down to… if a storyteller is looking all around, chances are they’re associated into it and they’re telling you what they see if you think back to the strange world exercise. If you’re doing that and if you find yourself looking out, like creating the space around you, keep checking back with the person you’re talking to that they’re either sharing that with you or keeping eye contact with you.
Maintain some eye contact always and some people prefer to process things differently, so some people if they’re processing what you’re saying, visually they aren’t going to be looking at what you’re describing they’re going inside and making pictures. Does that make sense?
People will respond differently in these situations. Eye contact is essential to bring people in and be aware that people have different thinking and processing styles, so just because they aren’t looking at you doesn’t necessarily mean they’re not listening. Quite often, if I’m listening to someone I’ll actually put my head down and get my ear closer and I’m making pictures and feeling my response to what I’m hearing.
Igor: The way to tell these things is just through experience. You do glance at them even if it’s from the corner of your eye to see that they’re still there. There should be a felt sense, a sense of yeah, I’ve got this audience interested versus something isn’t quite right and I don’t know what it is. So play around with it and you’ll get the varieties.
Robin: I’d like to invite you for the rest of the course, if you haven’t begun to do this already, whenever you’ve heard someone telling you a story simply feedback to them just anything that you noticed you enjoyed or liked about what they did.
Igor: And only what you enjoyed and liked about what they did, because we’re watering plants and where attention goes energy flows. Let’s only water the plants we actually want to come up. Otherwise you will get choked by weeds and that’s not useful. With that happy little story let’s take 90 min for lunch…
Robin: Meow.
Igor: Let’s do lunch and be back here to start at 10 till 2. Thank you.
[Lunch break]
Monastery & Cat Stories 3
Robin: Meow. So I wake up the next morning and I was still thinking about this guy coming round and feeling a bit intimidated about going into my back garden and there’s the cat again meowing at the door. Now my door has gotten really attached to it as well.
Igor: So there’s this man waking up in the middle of the afternoon because he fell asleep exhausted, second time in a row. He is beside himself with curiosity as to what’s happening here, what is this thing. He tries his best to keep his promise because he’s going round and digging in the garden with the monks and he’s helping prepare the meals and so on.
This question is burning inside his mind. What is going on? His curiosity gets the better of him so he starts dropping heavy hints. Tell me how was your night, sleep well? He’s keeping his promise but all the monks can look at him and shut up very quickly. Suddenly all the chatty ones become concerned, so that’s not working very well.
The day draws to an end and he’s locked back in his cell, his cubicle and lies down in bed. He’s been working hard all day so of course he falls asleep very quickly. He wakes up to this intense crazy sad noise that sounds like all the grief in the world, the terror and panic in the same place. It really shakes the foundation of the monastery.
The man is lying in bed and he’s terrified. He tries to get to sleep…
Robin: You know what that reminds me… because that day the cat meowed outside the door and I’m getting ready and eventually I look out the back door and the cat’s gone I can’t see it anywhere, so I think great. I have the chicken I roasted the day before. I really enjoy cooking and I think I’ll get the bones on the boil to make a nice chicken stock to have chicken soup later in the day.
So I start the pan going, start it boiling and check out the window and there’s no cat so I open the door so the kitchen doesn’t get too steamed up. It’s still morning and I have to start work so I have to think right quick jump in the shower. There I am in the shower. Isn’t this what you do in the shower? Oh no wait a minute, this is the Ericksonian hypnosis, go into trance…
Yes I’m taking a shower and having a great time and suddenly there’s knocking on my door. It’s a bit rude and loud, what’s going on? What’s that?
Oh it’s a loofah, and it starts off again, knocking on the door. Okay I get the message I’m wrapping a towel around me and getting out the door. I don’t go to answer the door I just look out the front window.
Igor: So there’s this guy, middle of the night and he’s terrified. He’s thinking what’s going on? He starts looking out the window to see if he can pick something out. He looks through the keyhole. He looks through the gap in the door to see if there are any shadows and there’s nothing going on.
This insane noise is going on and it lasts all night. Once again the crack of dawn, that first little finger of sunlight rising up over the hillside and when it touches the cornerstone of the abbey silence, peace, tranquility like nothing ever happened.
Robin: And that’s exactly the opposite of what was going on in my house, because I was standing there in front of the bay windows, and you know who it is right, it’s the bloody guy in the motorcycle gear whose cat keeps coming into my house. He’s standing there going, have you got my cat again? I’m like no of course I haven’t got your cat. Meow.
I think oh shit. Yes it is here but it’s just here. Do I have to tell you again? Am I going to have to bring you my vet bills? That cat has an owner you know. You can’t just steal it. I don’t want your cat. Why are you coming with this attitude? I’m trying to help you. I’ve given you my phone number so you can call me if the cat is ill.
I’ll just get rid of the cat but if you don’t mind I need to put some clothes on.
Igor: Meanwhile, the man wakes up the next afternoon and is still shaken. He works the grounds and tries to corner the odd monk or two and this happens for two or three days. Each time they turn pale as a sheet. You couldn’t have seen people paler than this and they scurry off and try to avoid eye contact. After a week or so of doing this, trying to corner people and talk to them, he’s got no friends left. No one wants to talk to him anymore because they know what’s going to come. One day the father abbot sits down with him and says I understand you’ve been working hard in the fields. The man says yes. You’ve done good work in the refectory. The man says yes. I hope you’ve been feeling the peace and tranquility of this place. The man says yes.
You’ve been asking some rather curious questions of our brethren here, the monks. The man gets sheepish and says yes. I understand your curiosity but you made us a promise and I’m going to have to ask you to keep it. The man can’t contain himself he just starts grabbing him by the shirt like he’s wearing a motorbike jacket and he says you have to tell me, it’s driving me crazy.
Each night I go to sleep when the sun goes down and after a few hours sleep suddenly this crazy noise comes, it’s terrifying. It’s sad. It’s all the pain in the world.
Robin: I know exactly what you mean I do. By now you can imagine, I’m just like getting ready, the cat snuck in while I was taking a shower. This guy doesn’t realize that I’ve been chucking the cat out 15 times a day and it’s not learning the lesson. He’s gone off angry at me. He probably thinks I have a little bowl of cream laid out for the cat and a nice little home for it and we’re going around stroking it and kidnapping it, saying no come play with us, not with him.
I’m just so frustrated, because he keeps coming round with all this bad energy. I’ve tried to be nice to him and tried to explain to him that I understand about his cat. He’s anxious about his cat because it’s old and has diabetes. He might have mentioned that earlier.
Igor: So the man of course, is almost frantic at this point. He grabbed the father by the coat and said please, please tell me…
Robin: And I’m frantic, I’m completely frantic by this point. I’m wondering around my house…
Igor: … and the father is saying what the hell are you talking about you made a promise, the only reason you stayed here was because you promised you wouldn’t ask anything. Please stop asking I cannot tell you, you’re not a monk. The man shuts up in frustration.
Robin: Yeah you know what, should we get on with the next exercise? Yes, probably best.
Nested Loops
Igor: So there’s a particular thing you do with your stories that can create a tremendous amount of curiosity for starters. It’s like a man leaving an office in a monastery, shaking his head at the frustration of… anyway, it’s a way of using a story so people really basically sit around and ask you more please, tell me more.
Robin: There’s a wonderful example of this that I remember from Tanzania, because I was born there and I go back there as often as I can. There’s a traditional of oral storytelling in the Sakuma culture. At night by a full moon in front of a fire people gather round and the old lady who makes the cassava whiskey, the local legal brew, she keeps it hidden in the leaves of the banana tree. Whenever you go round her house, my friend is a doctor and when we go from his surgery to his farm we’re going up the hill and he always goes, shall we do a lefty? We go visit the old lady who sells the cassava whiskey. She always has to drink some of it first to prove it’s not poison.
Igor: It would be rude not to.
Robin: She’s always off her trolley. I remember one night one of the storytellers, Juma, a witch doctor, did the absolute classic. He went that reminds me… no you don’t want to hear me and everyone goes…
Igor: Oh but please tell us.
Robin: He’s like well, oh no you don’t want to hear this.
Igor: You really should tell us. Please. I would really like to hear.
Robin: Really? Okay. Well, then he gets up and starts his story and there’s a lovely way they have, a certain rhythm to the way they talk. The audience is listening and getting into the rhythm as well because they’ll be sitting there and they’ll go, dao which means it is so… they’ve heard the story before so they’re all like yes, that’s the way it goes, ndyio.
So you get this marvelous kind of counter pointful rhythm between the storytellers speech and the response of the audience. Yeah.
Igor: So there’s a skill in here that might be of use to you. The easiest way of getting it is experiencing it for yourself. You have a stock of stories, whether or not you wish to change them out over time that’s your call. What I’d like you to do is to get in pairs and then tell three of your stories. When it starts getting interesting move onto the next one without actually finishing it.
Robin: When you start seeing interest and they start going oh really, go, that’s where the most important part, there’s this other one where this happened.
Igor: All you’re looking for is the cue of when to switch. It’s very simple. They’ll give it to you and you’ll go yeah that’s the one, oh yeah because on another time I had this other experience and off you go on the other one.
They’ll be like what, hello. First they’ll think this must have something to do with the first story so they’ll listen carefully and then they’ll go what, I’m confused and then they’ll forget one and go really, and that’s when you go on to the third one.
It’s a simple process, you just observe your partner for your cues of when to move on. It should only take you about three minutes but I’ll give you five minutes apiece so you should have more than plenty of time. Of course everything you’ve done so far still counts.
Robin: By the way, there are some simple phrases you can use to switch stories, like by the way, that reminds me, while I’m thinking about it, oh yeah it’s just like when…
Igor: There’s another time… it’s a little bit like or well, the best one is if you don’t even make a transition and you just start telling the other story and they’ll think you’re talking about one story and it takes them about 30 minutes to figure out it’s the other. That’s called the hard loop and they’re lots of fun to do.
We’ll let you experiment with that for now, just to have the different affects and experiences. Five minutes apiece, ten total, find a new partner, off you go. [Exercise starts]
Robin: By the way, this would be the worst marriage guidance counseling service in the world wouldn’t it? Change partners. Change partners.
Igor: Welcome back from the exercise, how did you enjoy that, good?
Group: Yes.
Igor: Who here is sitting at the edge of their seats going I need them to finish, don’t leave me hanging? What do you think might be one use for these nested or open loops? What might be a use for keeping loops open?
Student: With the nested loops your conscious mind only focuses on one story but the other story is still simmering just below the surface.
Igor: Exactly, so there’s a lot of unconscious stuff going on which creates a lot of curiosity. How do you feel right now when you have to suddenly leave halfway through the stories? Who feels like they want me to shut up so they can get back to finishing the story?
In psychology this is known as the zygarnick effect, which is when you leave an unfinished task or open question and the unconscious mind keeps running until that connection is made and is closed. So sometimes it’s useful to leave the loop open because they’ll keep looking for a better answer maybe for the rest of their life.
Robin: Another thing that zygarnick noticed, because she actually started researching this because she noticed the waiters at her local restaurant had a phenomenal memory for open tickets. As soon as the bill had been paid they couldn’t remember a thing.
Igor: No face, no name, nothing.
Robin: Unless they went through a transdurivational search where they went through a trance experience and returned to state. It’s also a useful way of embedding post hypnotic suggestions.
Igor: That’s something we’ll play with later today. Meanwhile, what were other
experiences?
Student: What was the question again? It does that too. It makes you forget.
Robin: It overloads conscious attention, like seven plus or minus two.
Student: Yes. As a storyteller I noticed that if you just allow the states to carry your stories unplanned it just flowed naturally to go from one to the next.
Igor: Exactly. Don’t make it a mechanical process it’s an organic process. A lot of people learn about nested loops and they start going okay, I shall pause precisely at 5 minutes 34 seconds, good, now we go to the next story.
Whereas actually what you’re doing is looking for the signals from the person going gotcha, time to go on.
Robin: I’d like to point out also that the nested loop effect is also the same technique that people use to bore you to death with the stories you don’t want to hear. Bear that in mind. Actually, the interview that Igor and I did together, the Master Class and Hypnotic Storytelling…
Igor: Is one big loop.
Robin: Yes. There are quite a few loops in there. My favorite quote from a guy I met in the Bahamas, he said he trained himself to listen to trance tapes while he was driving a car. He has one of those tractors that he mows lawn with and he crashed it listening to my tapes.
Igor: Gotcha. Thank you for mentioning that.
Student: I was just going to mention that this sounds eerily similar to hypnotic fractionation.
Igor: Exactly. That’s exactly what’s going on, you’re getting people experiences and they’re popping out and back in and back out. This is one of the ways that Erickson used to do a lot of his trance work. He would tell story after story. He tended to complete his stories more, but I think he was also aware of leaving things dangling so people would keep grasping whilst another thing is coming in this way.
Robin: By the way, all these hypnotic techniques are used throughout literature and movie making as a matter of course.
Igor: Meanwhile, at the other end of town…
Robin: Just think of all those stories that begin with… I discovered a secret book and
in that book was… the story. Here’s the adventure that happened to me.
There’s a book called Cloud 9 in the last few years by David Mitchell. It’s six
stories, the first starting in the past, the one in the middle in the future and
it’s a perfect set of six nested loops. The movie ‘Inception’.
Igor: Beautiful.
Robin: This is also the works of Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea, the Illuminati’s Trilogy. They used what’s called a Sufi Scatter Technique, because this technique is also used in Sufi teachings a lot. I use it in workshops as well because it confuses the hell out of people.
Igor: No, surely not.
Robin: Just moving from one thing to another and back to this one and over to that one and back to that one.
Igor: Did any of you experiment with the idea of not actually telling them when you transitioned to the other story and just telling the other story? Wasn’t that impact a little mind warping, where at first you go yeah that makes it… doesn’t make sense anymore and suddenly you realize you’re in a completely different story so you have to back track the whole start of the story to figure out what this new story is about.
Did you notice that sort of thing happening?
Group: Yes.
Igor: That’s a great point at which, if you want to do anything hypnotic to begin.
Student: I just noticed as you’re telling the story and the person is getting in and in, you keep switching and if you were to say embed a lesson just about there they are in a yes set. They don’t even remember they’re doing it.
Robin: Excellent thank you.
Igor: That’s an excellent realization, you’ll probably teach the rest of the day for us. I think we should take a break. Anyone else?
Robin: I’ve just wet myself.
Igor: Is your drinking problem coming back?
Student: That reminds me of a story.
Student: It’s not related directly to the exercise here, but it’s an observation because some time ago I just told a story to a neighbor. That is I started to tell the story and we had to stop because my family went away. We didn’t meet for about half a year and after that half a year he said, I’m so glad to see you again, I was wondering how the story ends.
Igor: Fantastic! That’s a great example of that. I think Amir was asking how to get someone interested in his stories. Imagine you open loops like that and then you walk away.
Student: Perhaps a question about something you discussed previously. It seems that some people are on a mission, not here, but to sabotage your story and that it’s like the pause as you mentioned, sometimes you need half a second and they start pushing through their story.
Igor: It can happen.
Student: Again the story is very hard. Perhaps you all met those kinds of people. How do you win the authority to get your pauses right?
Igor: There are a couple ideas, one being just to recognize that most people aren’t that way, which helps. Second is to ask yourself which kind of conversation do you have? Is it a one to one conversation or are you in a group? If you’re in a group you can basically carry on with your conversation anyway and if they’re hooked into your story they’ll ignore his, it’s an unwelcome interruption. If it’s one to one than you have to ask yourself whether it’s appropriate for you to force your story on him as he’s forcing it on you, if you see what I mean. There’s a social context there and of course there are social cues. For example, if I heard Robin do a cat-like noise like meow, I can always add something to remind him that there’s a monastery and the man has to get back to his room because it’s getting late. No one is allowed out after dark because stuff happens, right?
Robin: Yeah, I know what you mean because I was really worried about this cat it was keeping me up all night.
Igor: So… So… So… there he is going to sleep. You have other mechanisms to take control of the conversation, but before you use them ask yourself if it’s appropriate. Maybe he desperately needs to get this story out and then his ears will be open enough to listen some more. Don’t be in a rush to block them just because they’re blocking you. Get a sense of where the context is at.
Robin: I suspect that your experience with men and women in that kind of environment would be different and let’s face it, often when we meet people your experience with men and women would also be different in a different way, I wasn’t making comment about gender. I’m making a comment about competition and ego and space, and a lot of time when we meet people when we’re in social groups, there’s a competition for the alpha position, whether male or female.
Igor: Of course, there is the… people do this don’t they?
Robin: In our civilized world, typically the alpha controls the group not through physical force but by controlling the ongoing story of the group. Another little element is a book called Games People Play by Eric Byrne. He also wrote I’m Okay You’re Okay. He was a transactional analyst.
He talks about strokes. The way I approach those kinds of situations with a new group is every communication I give is like a stroke. If it’s about me, if I’m talking about myself, my audience is giving me a stroke. It’s like okay there you go some attention for you. When I’m listening to them it’s like oh yeah, here’s some attention for you and we trade strokes.
If I’m telling a story that’s actually about you that’s reversed because I’m stroking you. Please don’t get this the wrong way it’s not that kind of seminar. So there’s an interplay of strokes and as we reveal things about ourselves we give permission for others to do the same and vice versa, it’s a tradeoff. If I find myself in a situation where that’s not happening, I leave. I don’t want to be around people who are self obsessed. Well, not all the time anyway.
Igor: Does that help?
Rita: My storyteller was giving me five or six nested loops. I was really interested in all of them and suddenly I went berserk, like stop it I’m going to strangle you
now, because I want to hear one of them. It put my conscious mind back because it was like a blowout or something.
Igor: There is something called too much of a good thing. It’s true. People have
come up to me and said so how many nested loops do I have to tell before someone goes totally unconscious? If you take this seven plus minus two thing, what if I tell like nine stories will that totally blow out consciousness? Quite possibly. What about 15 or 25? It reminds me of when I was a kid and with my dad arguing in the car scene, who would win a bear or a wolf? A bear. What about three wolves and a bear? Maybe the wolves. What about five wolves and five bears and a jaguar?
It’s one of those stories that have no ending to it. How much is enough? You look and when that frown or frustrations comes in a little crinkle there and a fist starts forming, that’s why I was thinking about it earlier. That’s the sign that you’ve had enough. Does that help?
Rita: It helps me not strangling him.
Robin: It really depends on context. You can get away with much more in a hypnotic environment. In the Master Class I think we got up to 10-11 loops.
Igor: But we do close them as well in the middle.
Robin: Some of them. Some of them are still open.
Igor: I know. It’s a good learning to have because it’s all context dependent and if you observe your partner you’ll get a sense when good things start deteriorating, at which point you want to close some loops or do something else.
Robin: Bear in mind, you’ll possibly get the reaction that I imagine. I’m imagining Rita wasn’t probably actually expressing like that but was actually getting more tense and more frozen, would that be accurate?
Rita: No, I really went for the neck.
Robin: Up until that point?
Rita: I got more tense.
Robin: You were getting tense but you weren’t actually expressing it…
Igor: It’s a show of attention immobility, pulling back, looking away…
Robin: People will go into that response rather than an active one, so watch out for paralysis.
Igor: No always a good thing.
Student: When you were talking about the alpha person who was speaking when you’re a storyteller, sometimes I’ve learned that you allow the alpha person to tell their story that way they can do their marking, and when you can see where the point is that you want to enter the story and support their story and learn how you can intertwine their story with yours and sometimes you also find out, maybe I don’t want to be in part of his/her story.
Igor: Exactly.
Robin: That’s the beater strategy. If you’ve seen the rutting stags or whatever it is and there’ll be a couple fighting it out and while they’re having a fight, one of the other stags will zip round and take her away.
Igor: I call it the Colombo approach. Remember the TV show who was like a bumbling idiot. Just one more question and everyone thinks he’s an idiot but of course he’s a genius who solves it all. That’s a good way to work with alpha’s if you have to, which is to make it seem as though it’s all to their credit and of course they’ll go sure you can tell your story. It’s all about how good I am. Then of course, everyone is going great story well done and by then it’s too late. Thank you for sharing that.
Student: I was just going to say that I was the stranglee and I’m not sure, but she did have a definite fixation of attention and I think I might have gotten beyond the attention part of ABS.
Igor: Did you go into stimulating unconscious response. Not a necessarily useful one although I guess it can be converted. It just shows the value of paying attention to people and see how they’re responding.
Robin: In public and social situations, I rarely nest more than two or three deep.
Student: In this room people are predisposed to listening to you as an active event. I noticed in your Power of Conversational Hypnosis when you talked about waiting for the metro or something and trying to talk with an individual and you had to go first and give them the time to get there with you.
Igor: Yes, this is a slightly different strategy. This is talking more about how do you warm people up to have a conversation if they’re strangers?
Student: Exactly, but they could be in your own house and be far away.
Igor: Absolutely. You could have a shy person at a party but then this works even better because they basically don’t know what to say so they wish you’d keep talking because they’re too embarrassed to add. It’s actually the opposite problem which now is a no-brainer for us because we can be polite enough to keep the conversation going until they have warmed up enough to contribute. This stuff helps, especially with the open loops. They’ll go oh tell me more about this and suddenly they feel like they’re contributing because they have something to talk about.
Let’s do something useful with what we’ve been doing so far. Let’s add an extra element.
Robin: A couple of examples. I was called in by a company I hadn’t actually worked with before. In fact, I hadn’t even met the guy but a mutual colleague put us in touch. He rang me up and said I’m going to do this pitch for an away day, a training weekend, can you come help us? I had some skills that they were looking for, for that pitch and experience.
I turned up and shook hands with the guy I’d never met before. We sat down in the room and the interview panel started off and said tell us about yourself. I was completely in the dark. I had a rough idea of what we were doing, but was in the dark about what this guy was going to say. So I start with the truth. I said do you know what, we’ve only just met, but I have this friend Pamela and she’s one of those women who, she’ll turn around a company, develop a new product line and then have breakfast.
She’s so on top of her game and she said to me, you have to work with these guys, so here I am.
Igor: Do you get a hint of what this might be about?
Robin: It’s a personal pronoun switch. The story is using the word you, she is saying you to me, in that you have to work with these guys. I am turning that around so you have to work with these guys. That’s one way of doing it.
Igor: At the end of the whole desert island survival thing you get tested. We get picked up by helicopter and it flies out to the islands and is beautiful oceans and so on, lots of little picturesque islands that are hell holes when you actually get there. Then halfway through the flight is an announcement over the intercom.
There are just two of you in the back with the pilot in the front and it’s like when the intercom things coming through flashing, mayday mayday, abandon ship. The helicopter hovers a bit lower so we don’t die, but you have to jump out and swim to shore. I don’t know whether you have a thing for heights or not but you can imagine standing at the edge of a helicopter with a rail just outside the helicopter that you put your feet onto.
You shouldn’t jump from inside because all kinds of unpleasant things can happen. So you actually stand on the rail and you have to time it with the other person because if you jump too soon, as a commercial helicopter it has less balance and weighs less. If one of you jumps too soon it’s like a food blender.
So you’re standing there looking down, you’re looking at your partner and looking down and the call comes, go-go-go, so you have to look at your partner and time it just right…
Robin: So you’re looking down there and you know what it’s like when, so I’m just about to jump off the cliff and you know what it’s like when you’re looking down.
Igor: You’re looking down. Get the idea. I’d like you to find a new partner. Tell your nested loops again. You can make new ones if you want or use the ones you’ve already used. Only within them I would like for you to pause within moments and actually switch those referential indexes. Go to the second person and stop talking about you when you’re talking about yourself or whoever the story is about.
Let’s do it relatively quickly, 3-4 minutes apiece and we’ll come back and add something to it to make the whole thing a lot of fun. New partner. Same story or new stories it’s up to you. Off you go
Robin: That company said they were going to call us back next week but we didn’t make it to the car park. They called us up and said we want to work with you.
Igor: So how did you experience that, the switching of indexes?
Student: I think they…
Igor: They probably confused each other with who they are.
Amir: As a storyteller I found it quite difficult to start, going from one thing to the other.
Igor: Once the doors are open you just keep rolling right?
Amir: Yes, and I was looking for ways to close the loop.
Igor: To close the story loops themselves? We’ll come onto that, it’s actually straightforward. How do you get on switching to the you’s and so on?
Amir: That was easy.
Igor: How do you experience it as the listener, having someone switch? Let me ask you this, did they pull you into the story more or push you out of it more? It pulled you in overall right? Did anyone lose sense of a little bit of reality of where you were, it’s like yeah I’m actually much more I’m there in the experience now?
Amir: As a storyteller it was very easy to do. I added more characters into the story and then it got really confusing. Not only did I confuse the person in front of me but I confused myself and then I did something I didn’t think I was going to do, where I was not just making positive suggestions to the person in front of me but I also played being that person and saying thank you so much for you saying…
Igor: Giving them reaction right back.
Amir: I thanked myself for suggesting they set it and it was interesting.
Igor: A very warped reality. Would it be fair to say that what Amir just did there, could you call that a transformational story?
Group: Yes.
Igor: He’s presenting suggestions. He’s giving the reactions to suggestions and the kinds of gratitude that’s presupposing the work so the other person gets a sense of oh, well here’s a method of resolving the problem I have.
Student: He does it in a natural way.
Igor: Yes. Absolutely right, he’s just a nice chatty sort of person so he can do that naturally, but all of you did it to a certain degree already, so what we’re going to do now is formalize that.
Robin: I usually keep track of stories. Igor knows occasionally I’ve been mid-story and wondering where I was going with it.
Igor: Oh yes.
Robin: Although usually my unconscious usually takes over at that point and goes here’s where you are, oh yeah.
Igor: Except when he says here’s where you want to go, in which case a new story comes out, but it’s engaging.
Student: Just as a joke in the last loop I got a completely unrelated suggestion, that this is because you’re going to buy this insurance or feel protected. It was a joke but even now I can feel there is a jolt in my brain of just the way that my mind immediately rejected the idea. I can feel it was a kick.
Igor: Of course, because your unconscious recognizes the vulnerable state you put someone else in, in terms of you’ve opened the mind up and there are ethical considerations in play. There’s nothing wrong with making an offer for something. There’s nothing wrong with presenting people a transformational moment where they can get a sense of oh, if I do follow these steps this is the kinds of outcome I can expect, but really the choice has to be theirs. That’s what we’re getting into now. You’ve opened a bunch of loops. This morning we started off telling transformational stories, correct? So why don’t you put this together. Tell your three opening stories, do your transformational story…
Robin: With a referential index shift.
Igor: Which you switch to the, you rather than the, I’ll person or whatever. When you finish your transformational story and there’s that catharsis then whilst in that afterglow go straight back to the end of the third story, second story, first story, so you close them in reverse order. Tell your transformational story, my dad told me something pretty amazing and looking back and then you have your other story.
It makes me think of the man in the monastery who we haven’t finished with yet so I won’t close it. Do you see how simple it is to just go flipping right back at the end of it once you have that moment of oh yeah this is good and then you close one-two-three, done? The key here though for looping is if you tell stories one-two-three, you’ll close them in reverse order three-two-one, just because they neatly connect to each other in time. Simple?
Student: What’s the maximum time you leave a story unfinished before the person forgets you’ve told the unfinished story?
Igor: Life. Some people forget sooner, some later. I had one seminar person come up two years later and say do you know that story you told please, it’s been bugging me for two years, tell me what happened. I forgot the story and I was like no. I have to watch the DVDs to figure what the story was. Some people just forget and move on but others just can’t.
Robin: I once worked with a drug addict who, we did some trance work and he remembered this memory popped into his mind and it was the cover of his chemistry exercise book from when he was 13 years old. He’d written a poem on it. Something like, the end is nigh, I’m going to die, heroine’s all I’ve got. The only way I spend my day is sitting smoking pot.
He’d written that as some type of joke when he was a teen, but every time he sat down to a typewriter or keyboard to test it out that’s the poem he’d write. He was completely unconscious of the connection between the two things. Chances are you told yourself a story when you were very young and a powerful storyteller and that storyteller is still going on.
Igor: In fact, the story you told yourself when you were very young is your current life. It can be powerful things that happen.
Student: I understand… how to make a connection between two opposite kinds of stories, like laugh and to fail. How to make connection from one to another when they are totally opposite. What’s the easiest way?
Igor: Well, the simple version of that is that you shift your own emotions with it. Let’s say everyone is sitting here laughing and going this is so crazy, you’re a funny guy and you’re like yes I’m a funny guy. It’s not always laughter. I remember working with one guy who had gone through some really difficult times, and now my second story, so you have to make the transition yourself and that becomes an emotional bridge they can follow into the next story. The people that excel at this are in theater. In fact, Shakespeare was a genius at this. He’d create a comic moment, followed seconds later by one with absolute tragedy. That’s the way to do it.
Robin: When you get into this a bit more, there are a number of different ways of structuring the kinds of stories you tell, the emotions you elicit from each story and how you chain those together with anchors. This is an NLP term, have you heard of sliding anchors?
Igor: Or chaining anchors.
Robin: Right. Yes, it’s possible to chain your story so you actually lead people through a series of useful states. So you lead them for example, from frustration and overwhelm to confidence and safety.
Igor: And there are steps you take in between.
Robin: So you start with the first storey in your external loop. You talk about the problem state, the state in the middle is your resourceful state and the states in the way are steps to that goal. Is that clear?
Student: What’s the effect of closing in the wrong order?
Igor: It’s not that it’s bad it’s just that the opposite question is more interesting, which is what is the effect of closing the loops in the reverse vs the correct order. That is that let’s do it with recency and primacy. We remember most easily the first and last thing that you experience. The things in between tend to fall out of memory.
If you started your first story and you end with the first story you remember one story and it’s ending, so they’ll tend to connect and the things in the middle drop out and then the same thing happens with the second layer and if they have enough memory for that then the second layer is fully connected as well, which what’s underneath that drops out.
So you create those layers so the things inside end up dropping out the middle. I like to call it the donut technique, because you have your donut and it’s very boring until you inject the jam in the middle. No one knows where it is but when you bite in that’s where you’ll find it.
Arthur: Could you go over again the way and reason for switching a referential index in the middle of a story?
Igor: Sure, happy to do that. Can we take this question first because it seems to be related to what we just talked about? I don’t want to keep the loops too open.
Student: You explained how to lead someone out of a state through a more resourceful state and resolve it through three stories. Would you do a nested loop with that? Because at the same time the nested loop wouldn’t that run the risk to reconnect that to the problem?
Igor: The endings don’t have to have the same emotions.
Student: Okay.
Robin: It’s complicated. The simplest structure is that you start the outside with frustration with the problem state, which means you will also finish talking about the problem state. In the middle is the resource state. I would usually use five or so stories so you have five steps along the way.
For it to work effectively you need to elicit and anchor each emotional state on each step of the journey and I usually throw in a confusion pattern before the resource state and I will also trigger the problem state using whatever anchor I’ve setup just before the solution state as well. Those are finesses.
Igor: Keep it simple. As long as your endings are clean. All stories don’t have the same emotion entirely so you can have a happy ending to all three stories so the states become simplified. There’s a much simpler way of dealing with it. Now, going back to Arthur’s question. The simplest version are the words, you know what it’s like when you’re or another one might be, just imagine you’re and typically this happens at some type of climax. You know when you’ve been trying really hard to achieve something and you just get on top and look back on your life and go this is it?
It’s like that. I got on the top most pillars of the rock you can stand on and was looking out and thought you’ve really made it. You just switch. You do it 100 times when you’re in stories you just don’t realize it.
Robin: The effect is to associate the person into the story.
Igor: It makes it their story then, at some level. The transformational story you start and finish in one block it’s its own thing.
Robin: Can you remember what the exercise was?
Igor: Very simply you’ll tell a story one, story two, story three, not completing it. Then tell your transformational story, all the way through until the happy ending. Finish story three, finish two and then finish story one, it’s that simple. Especially at this transformational stage you will switch to, you will switch to you will switch. I won’t switch you will switch. It can be the third or fifth story it’s just the one in the middle that will be the transformational story like we did this morning. It’s much easier to do than to talk about. How about we just try that. Let’s take 6 minutes apiece, different partners, start with the three loops you opened up and tell your full transformational story from this morning and then close the loops in reverse order. [Exercise starts]
You had a good sense of what loops do and how they open minds. Then you notice how when you put the transformational story in the middle of the open loops the impact is different, more profound and more personal, especially if you switch that index point that we talked about. Anything else before the break?
Robin: Meow.
Igor: That’s a good point. Let’s take a break.
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