Meet The Delegates 9: The Street Magician - by Matthew Wingett

PROFILE

Name: Mike Stoner
Age: 47
Job: Street Magician, Rock Musician
NLP Context: Employment, Personal Life
NLP LIFE TRAINING courses attended: Licensed NLP Practitioner, October 2009
Home Country: England

I've been doing hypnosis for entertainment purposes for a little while, now.  I do impromptu hypnosis at parties or at wedding receptions, things like that.  It's also part of my stage act with the rock band I play.  I'm the hypno guy who puts on a show with the band. 

So, I do hypnosis in the streets and in pubs.  I enjoy doing it.  And I make sure that the audience enjoy it too, because if they didn't they wouldn't get their friends to do it as well.

I came on this course because I thought: "Well, I can do this hypnosis thing.  So let's find out more about it, and also how to use it to benefit other people, rather than just for entertainment purposes."

And that's what brought me to this course.  Some of the other hypnotists I know - because we have a big meeting once a month in London - recommended NLP to me - and especially the NLP Life Practitioner and Master Practitioner courses.  I thought: "Well, I have some redundancy money from when I was laid of three months ago for retraining, so I've spent some of it on this course."

And you know what?  It hasn't been quite what I expected!  It's been so much better!  Naively, I thought I'd come on the course to learn things about how to use NLP on other people.  I didn't realise how much it would effect me as well.   And I've learned an awful lot.   It's helped me - I'm excited about the possibilities it has given me for the future in myself, as well as with family, friends and potentially clients in the future.

One of the things this course has done for me is make me realise that I just tend to avoid various problems in my life and not think about them.  That's because I don't even analyse them - I just worry about them pointlessly.  I can even look at things that worried me five years ago and they worry me now. What's silly about that is when I was working I was a business analyst, and I used to analyse problems, find solutions and get paid for presenting the solutions.  Yet I wasn't solving my own problems in my own life.  And this course has shown me that that is a very silly way to act and that you can actually look at yourself.  Analyse what's going on and make a positive change.  It's the best way to maximise the potential in your life.

In the short term, I'm going to see how I can use what I've learned at the course with family, friends and myself.  It has given me the confidence to actually set up my own business and make money both from the entertainment side that I do, and from the "therapy" side of things as well.  I like the possbility it gives me to actually work with people to help them.  I didn't realise how beneficial NLP could be.  It makes me want to help myself and then to use that to help other people.  And I'm looking at going on the Master Practitioner course some time in 2010. 

Richard's teaching style is very different to anything I've come across before.  I had read some of his old Trance-formations book before I came on this, and actually looking back on it now, it does a very good job of actually representing the way that he speaks and communicates.  You know, it was written way back in '82. 

I find it very interesting...  I realised... the first couple of days I was taking the training on the surface.  And then I started to realise: well, there are other levels to this.  I started to pick them up and I'm sure there are another four or five levels underneath that I'm not yet picking up, but in future I think I'll get more and more out of this.  I'd almost like to do this course again and be able to go to those extra depths which I'm missing the first time through.

Richard is a great communicator.  He's someone who can really work well with people.  The week before I came on this course I was reading something on a hypnosis forum and it said: "Richard Bandler - genius or nutcase?" (Laughs).  and there were lots of hypnotists discussing this point.  Having seen him, I would say 80 percent genius, 20 percent nutcase.  And that's no bad thing!  (Laughs)  We've all got some nutcase in us! 

I think this is going to be very useful on a therapeutic level.  In fact it's made me almost feel guilty about using some of the skills for entertainment.  There are certain word patterns I've already used in hypnosis with people - and I'm putting them into a proper context now. I was using them unconsciously before.  It makes me almost feel bad that I was using them to get people to stick their feet to the floor or think they're Michael Jackson, and all this kind of stuff, which is what I was doing before.  But all in balance!

Back on the therapeutic side... this course makes me want to help people.  These aren't skills that you just put into your mind and you store away as an experience from the past, it's something that opens up possibilities for the future and I think that is great.  I've never been on a course that is so inspirational about the change it can make to you and to other people's lives using what you've learned.

I would absolutely recommend it to others.  Absolutely.

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