The One Key To Milton Erickson’s Success That Nobody Taught You How To Do
I originally wrote this letter from Phoenix, Arizona. Phoenix is known as the home of hypnosis. It got this reputation because Milton Erickson M.D. lived and taught here for many years. Erickson was a legendary hypnotist whose work became the basis for Neuro-linguistic Programming.
There, I climbed Squaw Peak, a local mountain. It took several hours to climb. Squaw Peak was famous in the work of Milton Erickson because he told many of his clients to climb it. After climbing the mountain, people reported making significant changes in their lives.
I wrote this letter while sitting at the base of Squaw Peak. I began to remember the times that Erickson told people to climb Squaw Peak.
In my favorite story, a couple came to Erickson to decide whether or not to divorce. On the first day, Erickson told the husband to climb Squaw Peak and told the wife to go to the botanical gardens. On the second day, Erickson told the wife to climb Squaw Peak and sent the husband to the botanical gardens. On the third day, Erickson told them that the therapy was over. They went back to their home and got divorced. They both later wrote Erickson that they realized during their time in Phoenix that they had nothing in common.
Much of Erickson’s work was done in just this way. His approach to therapy frequently consisted of creating Tasks for his clients to give them an experiential basis for reorienting their thinking and behavior. In fact, most of his hypnotic therapeutic work was also based on these same principles, but instead of assigning tasks in the real world, Erickson would have his client hallucinate the life experiences while in trance.
Nothing beats a real experience when it comes to change. Scan through your past and you will find that most of the times you have changed -really changed-were in response to actual experiences, something that you were a part of, rather than talking about. In the moment of an actual experience, the threads of a dozen ideas and a dozen emotions can be brought together in a way that is undeniable and affecting.
Tasking is a therapeutic approach in which you create for your client an actual experience that has within it the change in perspective s/he needs. Because it is an actual experience, a Tasking approach avoids the undermining defenses that clients naturally raise when they are talking about their situation. Tasking transforms the therapeutic interaction from a conversation about the problem into an actual experience that can change the problem.
Do You Remember When Erickson:
• Had a man name his wife’s breasts?
• Had a woman plant African violets for her community?
• Had suicidal woman squirt water through her teeth?
• Had a couple urinate on their bed?
What Erickson recognized explicitly is what we all know intuitively: Change comes through doing something different.
How did Erickson know what tasks to assign to each client? How did he get them to carry out those tasks? When I ask people do something, sometimes they turn me down flat. This problem has intrigued me for years.
Twenty five years ago, a young graduate student named David Gordon went to study with Milton Erickson. He was different because he was one of the developers Neuro-Linguistic Programming. David Gordon wanted to model Erickson.
David went on to write two classic books on Erickson, Therapeutic Metaphors and Phoenix. These books give incredible insight into Erickson’s patterns.
Yes, David was my companion on that climb up Squaw Peak that day.
When we finished the climb, I asked David Gordon to teach a seminar on Hypnosis. He turned me down flat.
I persisted.
David finally agreed to design an entirely new seminar. A seminar on tasking.
You will explore the world of Tasking, how change works through experiences, and how to create such experiences for your clients.
You will learn how to: Step into a client’s experience as a way of identifying what s/he needs in terms of a change, Recognize the structure that is holding a problem in place, Find leverage points for change, Generate real life experiences -Tasks – that give your clients a direct experience of the change in perception, thought and behavior they want and need.
Studying with David Gordon, one of the original developers of NLP is always a magical journey. David has always been one of the most highly sought after trainers in the NLP and Ericksonian world.
David Gordon taught new seminar on Tasking exactly one time at my hypnosis center.
The tuition was $677.77 to attend live. And then something unusual happened, David asked me not to sell the recordings.
For several years, they sat on a shelf but surprisingly, several years later he gave the okay.
It’s entirely possible he will ask me to take them down once again.
Their goal is to be able to emulate the Wizard of Phoenix, Milton Erickson in getting the best results for their clients.
If you care helping people change, you need to watch these recordings.
They are priceless. Order your set today.
Harlan Kilstein Ed.D.