Who Me?: How to Choose the Best Volunteers by Sean Michael Andrews

Title: Who Me?: How to Choose the Best Volunteers

Author: Sean Michael Andrews

Format: e-book (Amazon Kindle)

Price: $2.99 (I got it when the author was giving it away.)

Rating: Good

Readers of this blog will know that I’ve reviewed a number of Sean Michael Andrews’ videos, and I’m an avid reader of his Street Hypnosis Newsletter. So—full disclosure here—we are online friends if not bosom buddies, and he has sent me review copies of a lot of his work. In this case, though, I was able to nab his new kindle e-book for free before he raised the price to an exorbitant two dollars and ninety-nine cents!

So, here’s the low-down on this download:

Like a lot of e-books out there, it’s a quick read at low cost, but you shouldn’t be fooled by its “cheaper than food” price. Who Me?: How to Choose the Best Volunteers is packed with wisdom gained the hard way, through decades of trial and error, individual experimentation, and careful research.

I must admit that I’m often reluctant to work with an individual volunteer when I’m giving a presentation, and for the very reasons, SMA notes in his opening: You only get one shot to impress your audience or completely humiliate yourself in front of a room full of strangers. Indeed, I’ve often thought, “If only there were a sure-fire way to pick the right person to demonstrate with.”

Well, there is no 100% guaranteed way to get the right volunteer, but with the tips in this book, you’ll certainly stack the deck in your favor. And that’s a lot of what hypnosis is about—stacking the deck in your favor. So this book is the next best thing to a guarantee.

Now, fans of “hypnotizability scales” may be disappointed that SMA’s work is based only in part on clinical suggestibility trials. Most of his advice is based on personal observation. These are tricks of the trade, and the author is sharing them because they work.

Of course, it’s important not to fall in the trap of thinking that this book supports the idea that some people aren’t hypnotizable. In your office, you should presuppose that everyone is hypnotizable, because you have the time to give individual attention and find the right approach for each client.

But when you need to be sure you get the best responder for a public demonstration, Andrews’ advice is golden.

Now, very few works are perfect. I give SMA points for a readable text with clarity and good grammar (not to mention some humor). In fact I was a quarter of the way into the book before I stumbled over a typo.

I would love it if SMA had provided a summary checklist at the end of the book, just to make internalizing the material that much easier. I’ll probably re-read and create such a checklist myself.

My biggest concern with this book has to do with something the author mentions in passing. When noting that people with Dissociative Identity Disorder (formerly known as Multiple Personality Disorder) tend to be highly suggestible, SMA repeats a highly questionable theory that DID is caused by childhood trauma, specifically that it’s an extreme form of repression.

As it turns out, there’s considerable evidence that, like repressed memories, multiple personalities almost never present “in the wild” and appear to be overwhelmingly iatrogenic—that is they are far too often caused by suggestions from therapists (or popular culture). So of course, those with DID are highly suggestible: That’s why they were able to develop a syndrome at the suggestion of their therapist.

(For more information on this, check out Mark Pendergrast’s Victims of Memory, which I’ll feature in an upcoming review.)

That said, the advice that people with DID will make for highly suggestible volunteers is spot-on. It’s just the passing reference to discredited ideas about the syndrome’s origin that bother me.

My final complaint is hardly the author’s fault, though he might be able to remedy it. I’d appreciate it if the book were available in PDF format as well as Kindle e-book. The reason is simple: Despite the fact that the Internet has at least a dozen ways to get an Android device to read a Kindle book aloud, none of them have worked for me. For that reason, I can’t listen to SMA’s book during my commute, which is inconvenient, as I’d like to re-visit it periodically.

These few criticisms aside, I have to say I’m delighted with this book. And at less than three dollars, there’s absolutely no reason every hypnotist in the world shouldn’t buy it and read it today.

Building Blocks of a Better Attitude by Dave Berman

Title: Building Blocks of a Better Attitude

Author: Dave Berman

Format: e-book (PDF)

Source: http://manifestpositivity.com/product/e-books/building-blocks-better-attitude/

Price: $10

Rating: Excellent

The blurb for this book opens with these words:

“This book is for you if pessimism and cynicism aren’t working out so well . . . ”

Many years ago, I was rather pessimistic, and it didn’t work out. In fact, I became rather pessimistic that it would ever work for me, to the point that eventually my optimism about optimism crowded out my pessimism about pessimism.

In any case, I get the feeling that the author was probably a lot like me at one point, and he’s had to develop the skills necessary to maintain optimism. So on the drive out to an all-day hypnosis training, I had my smart phone read Building Blocks of a Better Attitude aloud to me. (BTW, if you’re not employing this trick or something similar to use your commute time to your advantage, you are missing out on a great continuing education opportunity.)

In this brief e-book, Berman spells out each of those skills necessary to build and maintain optimism, using the metaphor that each one is a building block that has allowed him to construct a healthier, more effective way to cope with the world. It’s like Pink Floyd’s The Wall in reverse.

Perhaps because Berman and I have studied in a lot of the same places—and as friends and colleagues, we’ve even traded books and influenced one another—I didn’t find a lot of material that was new to me. Your mileage may vary.

Even knowing a lot of the material, I had to admire the brilliance in Berman’s presentation. At first I noted that the book seemed a little short—then I realized that’s because of the utterly clear and concise way that Berman explains each building block, along with his logical progression from idea to idea. So, while the book draws from a number of different sources in disparate fields—and Berman is scrupulous about crediting his sources—it is an amazing work of synthesis, pulling all of these ideas and presenting them in a simple, easy-to-follow order. In many ways, it embodies the NLP principle of doing the very least to get the greatest effect.

Indeed, if I ever get the chance to work with a teen after-school group, I’d probably use Building Blocks of a Better Attitude as the text book, though I might have to re-frame the term better attitude if I do so.

It’s rare that I can’t find anything to complain about, so I hope that my readers will not take it as bias that I really can’t poke any holes in this book. If I were going raise any questions, it is perhaps that Berman doesn’t cite much in the way of peer-reviewed articles backing up his material, but that is a faint criticism at best.

In interests of full disclosure, I will say that the author and I were classmates at the Hypnosis Practitioner Training Institute (Go Turtles!), and we’ve developed a friendship as colleagues who trust and rely on each other’s judgment. Hopefully, my readers have seen me criticize enough of my good friends’ works to trust that I strive to avoid bias when reviewing. Also, while I’m certain that the author would have given me a review copy had I requested it, I opted to purchase this work—and I recommend that you do the same.

A Guide to Trance Land by Bill O'Hanlon

Title: A Guide to Trance Land: A Practical Handbook of Ericksonian and Solution-Oriented Hypnosis

Author: Bill O’Hanlon

Format: Book

Rating: Good

It's been a while since I posted a review--I've been busy editing several books and co-authoring one, so I haven't had a lot of time for leisure reading and reviewing. I am happy to dig back in with A Guide to Trance Land.

Bill O’Hanlon is a name you may know if you listen to any of the webinars that Ruth Buczynski hosts—at least that’s how I first heard his name. As the author himself explains, O’Hanlon was Milton Erickson’s gardener and student; the back-cover describes him as “a psychotherapist, professional speaker, and prolific author,” before mentioning that he has appeared on the Oprah Winfrey show.

Setting aside his reputation, I was eager to see if this small tome would hold up, and I have to say I was pleased with what I found.

For anyone familiar with conversational hypnosis or the Milton Model from NLP, the first section of the book is a concise review. Even so, as I read it, I thought to myself, “If I wanted a new hypnotist to grasp the basics of conversational hypnosis, this might be the book I would recommend.” The language is plain and clear, and each idea is presented in a short, easy to digest portion—something which O’Hanlon explains in his introduction he is doing on purpose.

Around page 68, though, the book went from being a good review or clear introduction into discussing something that is paradigm-shifting. You see, Erickson was known for having no unifying psychological theory, no single therapeutic approach; instead, it’s widely thought that he simply invented a new therapy for every client. In fact, Erickson is noted for having said that he wanted to fit his approach to each client, rather than fitting each client to the approach.

So, flying in the face of the conventional wisdom on Ericksonian hypnosis, O’Hanlon states that he has discerned a pattern in Erickson’s cases—a system, if you will.

Now, I’m not going to give away what that system is—if you want to know it, buy the book—and I can’t say whether O’Hanlon is right about the system he presents really being the essence of Erickson’s work. What I will say is that wherever it came from, the system O’Hanlon presents is brilliant, and perhaps it shouldn’t be buried in the middle of what seemed at first like a run-of-the-mill review of the Milton Model. It also needs a better name than the one O’Hanlon gives it: the “Class of Problems and Class of Solutions Model.” It’s got no zip; I just can’t dance to it.

In truth, O’Hanlon doesn’t prove his assertion; in fact, he doesn’t seem to be interested in making the case that the pattern he’s discerned is really there in Erickson’s case studies. Fair enough. I’ll still go out on a limb and say that his brief discussion starting on page 68 is something every hypnotist should take a look at. There’s a joke that Erickson once said of Bandler and Grinder (the inventors of NLP), “They think they have me in a nutshell, but all they have is the shell.” I think it’s possible that O’Hanlon got the nut.

As if that weren’t enough, O’Hanlon follows that brief passage with a really great discussion of the question “Should We Trust the Unconscious?” He really synthesizes alternate views on that topic in a plain-spoken, yet insightful, way.

Can I criticize A Guide to Trance Land? There are a few things that bother me, yes, but to tell the truth, they are really not important enough to even list.

My main criticism of this book is that I want more. I want more concrete examples of certain ideas, especially the “Good Trance/Bad Trance.” I want more discussion and examples of how to use the model he presents.

Overall, I have to say, it’s a good read with a number of valuable ideas for the hypnotist.