Trevor Silvester, Wordweaving.

If you thought this was going to be about hypnotherapy you would have been wrong!
Trevor has written a book, recorded a CD and produced some playing cards, all designed to help hypnotherapists and all other facilitators to be more effective in helping ‘clients’ acheive change.
His approach to this is via linguistics and the use of much NLP good practice.
Trevor began by discussing the use of ‘trance’ and whether it was beneficial to know what level of ‘trance’ your client has reached before you can help them with a specific problem. As you know.... sitting here... looking... at these words.... wondering.... (and its good to wonder)... where all this.... is leading.... ‘trance’ is a normal state which we all pop in and out of all day long. Trevor suggested that the presenting problem usually has its own ‘trance state’ into which the client goes when they are for example faced by a spider! So what people need is to be de-tranced by their visit to Trevor, or me, or you. Trevor talked about the figures on unconscious processing power versus conscious awareness (2 million bits per second and 7 + or - 2) and how we keep most things in the background of our awareness and only bring into foreground those things we want to pay attention to. Our ‘problems’ have a way of attracting our attention and leaping into our foreground unbidden and so the trick for the Hypnotist, therapist, coach, mentor or friend is to come up with an appropriate suggestion to change the ‘clients’ perception. Wordweaving is based on Erickson’s ‘artfully vague’ language, which allows the client to insert their own content into the process, whilst honouring the words they had used to describe their problem and often their solution to it. The key to this is being ‘artfully’ vague, not vaguely artful or just plain vague. Trevor added to this linguistic model the neurological levels model of Dilts. Listening carefully (always the best way) it becomes possible to notice from the clients use of language where the problem presents itself. Putting both these models together provides a useful structure not only for therapy but also for learning how to spot the language patterns used by the client.
Trevor has explored this in his book, Wordweaving, which is written as a workbook with the opportunity to practice as you read along. As a further aid to study he has now produced a CD to help the aspiring student provide his/her own answers to specific statements made by a ‘client’ before, after a short pause, being told the ‘right’ answer (if there is such a thing!) All this leads the scholar through the slough of ‘concious incompetence’ to the nadir of ‘unconscious excellence’.
After talking for much too long, by now!! Fascinating though it was, Trevor finally allowed us to experience ‘conscious incompetence’ in all its raw beauty and play with the cards he had brought along! Even in that brief time I realised, by now, how useful these were as an aid to personal growth, so, by now, being unable to ignore the subliminal messages, bought a pack as Trevor said, Bye Now, to us all, and we snuck out at about 10.45pm!!!
I made many personal learnings this evening.
1) Linking ‘problems’ with their location in ‘clients’ map of the world by using neuro-logical levels brings an extra dimension of elegance to therapy.
2) The only way to unconscious competence is through conscious incompetence, and its best to welcome the pain this brings rather than try to run away from it. It is after all the first step to new learning.
3) I must be clearer in my requests to speakers to allow plenty of time for play. Its often difficult to get the balance between imparting enough information to pique interest and having so much that there is no time to play and get the lessons in the muscle. Sorry Trevor if I didn’t make that clear enough.
However the evening was a lot of fun, packed with more information than we could really take in and there was as usual lots of laughter and high energy. Thank you Trevor and Rebecca for coming down to visit us and bringing with you the materials for our future growth.
For details on Trevor’s courses at the Quest Institute and to buy copies of his book Wordweaving, the CD or the pack of cards visit his web-site.

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