It's not logical but it works

In Western civilisation, with our scientific approach to life, we focus on reason, logic, facts and understanding.  This focus is essential and helpful.  However I often feel that in doing so we miss some of the key ingredients of the process of finding solutions to problems; the need to understand can get in the way of success.

Spock:  I'm unhappy to find I am
happy, its not logical!

Gaining insight is important, and it is useful if it helps your client decide on a new course of action that works better for them.  However, sometimes insight does not help.  Knowing you are an alcoholic is a step forwards, but is not enough to stop the drinking.

Talking through decision making with a group of clients the other day, it was clear that, while all used rational and logical analysis before making a big decision, two key ingredients were missing:

• Whether they feel motivated or still have inner conflict, and 
• Any information about what would actually happen.

While little decisions can be easy, big decisions appeared to require what we call a "leap of faith" and no one in the room really understood what made this happen, or why it happened.  Not having that information did not stop the movement though, or prevent the success or failure of the decision to act.

A lot of clients come in with decisions to be made, and a lot can be done to help by adding rational analysis, to speed up this review.   That can be enough to help.  However it is not always enough, and this suggests to me that all the rationality is doing is helping an inner intuition towards or away from acting.

For many the logic is of little help.  They will present in a confusing mix of information - some emotion, some fact.   

I find it useful to access their intuitive response, and although it is interesting, I find it rarely useful to understand it.  What is useful is that something has shifted and a change takes place; allowing this to remain a mystery lets you get on with the task in hand on not waste time.

A client asked for help to stop smoking.   Using visualisation, she was able to "see an image" of the the two parts of her, one that wanted to smoke, and one that wanted her to stop.   She was then able to "speak to each part" and listen to the response.  During this imagination and light hypnotic work, the images shifted and she began to feel differently.  She responded with emotion to the work she was doing.  She heard the positive intention of the smoker: to feel more alive!  She heard the positive intention of the non-smoker: to live longer!

So feeling alive and living longer where the motivations in conflict, and this intuition work brought them out.

What happened next defies logic.  In the 30 minutes following this work, the tale of how she had started smoking simply poured out of her.  We completed the session using affirmations - layering a series of positive emotions that made her feel fully alive on a pressure point (using the anchoring techniques in NLP).  She left with a trigger for feeling fully alive, enriched with positive memories, that she could use instead of a cigarette.

Neither of us knew what was going to happen during this session.  All we knew was that part of her was motivated enough to say that she wanted help.  I have not told the full story to protect its privacy, but she did not consciously know that the story she was going to "tell" was strongly linked to smoking.  The intuition work - using dynamic pictures, imagination and self-talk, accessed the resources she needed to make the change she wanted.

No amount of saying "smoking will damage your health", while clearly rational, was of any help at all!