Don’t forget, when you sign up for the course you also get an ebook full of techniques to help you with your change process, a series of emails to take you through the videos and the ebook step-by-step, and a set of planning sheets to use.
Hi. This is the start of a new series with the theme “Three Things I’ve Learned”. I’m going to take everyday aspects of my life and look for three life lessons that can apply to anyone who wants to develop as a person. It’s a good practice for me, as well as being, I hope, helpful to you. I’ll be running it in parallel with my video series on Seven Steps to a Change Plan.
I enjoy having plants around, particularly flowering plants. I’m a fairly erratic gardener, but plants often seem to do well for me in spite of that. So a few years ago, I bought a flowering orchid at an orchid show where they were selling off surplus plants. It didn’t flower again for several more years, but towards the end of last year I noticed that it had a spike on it. I started encouraging it with orchid food – though I’m not sure how much difference that really made. It was going to flower regardless.
About mid-October, it was out, and I brought it inside where we could enjoy it. If I’d cut it, it might have lasted a week if I was lucky, but I left it on the plant, watered it occasionally, and just last week the last flower started to die. It had bloomed for more than three months. (I once had a cyclamen that flowered continuously for over a year.)
1. Plants will bloom when they’re ready to bloom. So will you and I.
Something that I see over and over with clients who come to me for help to change is that their issue has been going on for years, and they’ve been unhappy about it for at least months before they were ready to take the action of coming to see me. I’ve been asked by concerned parents if I can “make” their son or daughter stop smoking, and the answer, sadly, is no. They’ll look for ways to stop when they’re ready to stop, and not before. I wish I knew how to create readiness to change, in myself or other people, but I don’t – any more than I can make an orchid bloom before its time. (I know professional orchid growers can force blooming, but you get the idea.)
2. If you want it to last, leave it attached to what nurtures it.
I know that the positive changes I’ve seen in myself over the past few years are not just random – they’re a consequence of having practices in my life which nurture what’s blooming. They have roots. If I tried to separate them from the roots, they’d die very quickly.
3. Even so, eventually it may come time for the blooming to stop, for now.
This isn’t inevitable, of course. Personal change is not actually the same as flowers blooming; it can last the rest of your life. But if we think of a bloom as a practice or something of that nature, there are plenty of things that have come into my life, had their time of blooming, and gone again – but they could be back. I used to paint, for example, but haven’t done that for a while. Eventually I will take it up again, in its time. Enjoy your blooms while they last, without concerning yourself too much about how long that’s going to be.
I hope you’ve enjoyed the Three Things I Learned from Gardening. Next time: Three Things I Learned from Engineering!
This is the continuation of the series in which I post the videos which are part (but only part) of my free online course on planning personal change. When you sign up for the course, you also get planning sheets, emails which take you through the process step-by-step, and a free ebook which contains some excellent techniques to make your change process easier.
This video is about motivation. Not a “push” motivation where you make yourself do things, but a “pull” motivation – having something so attractive to aim for that you want to go through the process in order to get to that prize.
I’m pleased to announce that I’m creating a new free mailing list for people who want help, encouragement and resources for personal development, health and wellbeing.
At least once a month, I plan to offer a new free resource – an audio recording, a video, an ebook, a checklist, a how-to guide, an introduction to a website, a personal development self-test or something of that nature. In keeping with that, when you sign up you’ll get a free resource immediately (you’ll have to go to the signup page to see what).
As well as the monthly resource posts, the members of the list get my blog posts emailed to them – and I’m stepping up the frequency of blogging to twice a week, at least for a while. Over the next few weeks, I’ll continue serialising the videos from my free online change course on Tuesdays, and there’ll be a new series, Three Things I’ve Learned, running on Thursdays. This is a series in which I look at aspects of my own life and draw lessons from them for personal change and development. (Depending on your location in the world, you may get these on Wednesdays and Fridays Mondays and Wednesdays instead.)
Finally, members of my list will get discounts, bonuses and sneak previews when I release new courses, CDs, books, ebooks or other content.
If you enjoy my blog, please subscribe to the new list to get even more value. I’ll treat your email address with respect, of course: it will never be sold or rented to anyone else, ever, and you can unsubscribe at any time.
Having a target is an essential start for a change plan. The thing is, though, that if you don’t know where you are now, it’s going to be difficult to head in the direction of that target.
Remember, there’s a lot more to this course than the videos. When you sign up, I take you through the whole process by email (and follow up to remind you to apply it), and you get a free ebook with additional tools and techniques for enhancing your ability to change, and planning sheets to use as you go through the course and plan your change. (Writing down your plan is a good way to improve your chances of actually carrying it out.)
This is the start of a series where I post the YouTube videos that make up part (but only part!) of my free online course on planning personal change. The first one looks at how to set and track your target. If you sign up for the course, you also get worksheets, I take you through the whole process by email (and follow up to remind you to apply it), and there’s a free ebook as well.
I gave up on New Year’s resolutions years ago. What I did instead was run “theme years” in which I focussed on some positive change for my life that I actually wanted. It worked really well for me. But a lot of people still make resolutions every year – and generally fail.
That’s true of change in general. Change is difficult – that’s why I’ve created three new email courses which show you simple, effective methods, systems and techniques for successful personal change.
I used to be a technical writer, so the courses cut to the chase, communicate clearly, and are carefully designed to make sense as a whole.
COURSE 1 is free. It’s a step-by-step guide to making a personal change plan, for whatever change you want to make. Having a plan greatly increases your chances of success – this is the first hurdle that so many New Year’s resolutions fall at. In a series of videos, I take you through seven steps to an effective personal change plan. I also include my ebook Change Techniques, revised and improved especially for this course, and spend several emails talking you through the high points of the ebook. (I have a lot of ebooks sitting on my hard drive unread, and I didn’t want that to happen with this one.) There’s a simple template to use in writing out your plan, and I take you through it in the videos and emails.
Here’s a video introduction:
COURSE 2 is an adaptation of my successful face-to-face course Change Your Mind, improved and updated. This one’s for people who know their plan and want to make sure they follow it successfully. Again, I use video, email and audio, along with a PDF worksheet, to take you through simple principles and practical techniques. By the end of the course, you’ll be competent in basic self-hypnosis, and be able to use it to turn your mind into a guided missile directed at your goal.
COURSE 3 goes a little deeper. It’s based around my audio series Transformation Skills, which addresses the barriers to change that you might have encountered – circling thoughts and emotions, procrastination, poor self-image, lack of confidence, bad habits and the inability to create new, positive habits. Eleven relaxing hypnotherapy recordings are the heart of this course, which again is conducted by email. The aim is to shift your perceptions of yourself and your future so that you can stride confidently towards your highest goals.
The email delivery format serves as a reminder to put the techniques into action in daily life. Even after the course is “over”, follow-up emails remind and encourage you about your change goals.
Plans for future courses include the stress management course Befriend Your Stress, and email courses on living smokefree and eating positively. (I’d love to hear your suggestions for others, as well – in the comments or by email.) They’ll appear on the Courses page on the Hypno NZ website as I create them.
I may even do a course which goes step-by-step through my Changing Health Behaviours book and CD. What do you think?
Anyway, happy New Year! I’m looking forward to a great 2010, and I hope I can contribute towards making yours better as well.
For more information, and to sign up for the courses, go to the Change Courses page.
Around a million people in New Zealand, almost 24% of the population, currently smoke at least once a month. Let’s say a million to make it easier to translate the percentages into numbers.
The Ministry of Health has just released a report into a 2008 survey around stopping smoking, and while I don’t find the content particularly surprising, the sheer numbers involved are startlingly large.
So, of those million smokers, about 600,000 have tried to stop smoking in the past 5 years. About 300,000 of these have deliberately stopped smoking for at least 24 hours in the past 12 months, and on average they have tried this twice in those 12 months. Asian smokers were about twice as likely as others to have tried to stop, for some reason, and European people less likely than average. Around 200,000 people stopped smoking for at least a week in the past 12 months.
Of the 300,000 people who tried to stop smoking in the past 12 months, 225,000 did so for their own health, 111,000 because of the cost of smoking, more than 100,000 because they were sick of smoking, and 80,000 because of someone else’s health. Obviously, some people had more than one reason. Significantly more women than men tried to stop smoking because of someone else’s health, which makes sense, since women often try to stop smoking while pregnant or because of their children. This matches pretty closely to the reasons that my stop-smoking clients give me when I ask.
So, how many actually succeeded? Of the 300,000 people who tried to stop smoking, about 19,600 actually did stop and remained smokefree for the 6-12 months prior to the survey. Of these, other research indicates that around 15,000 will never return to smoking. That’s about a 5% successful quit rate in a year.
Here’s an interesting part to the survey. Current and past smokers were asked about their beliefs and attitudes as well as their behaviours. Based on the results, about 235,000 people in New Zealand are smokers but, if they had their lives over again, they say they would not choose to smoke. And yet, when asked if they agreed with the statement that “Smokers who fail to quit do not really want to quit”, 138,000 agreed and only 120,000 disagreed. They want to stop, they fail to stop, and yet they believe it’s because they don’t really want to. Whatever “really” means.
So what did people do to try to stop smoking? Almost 60,000 used nicotine replacement therapy (NRT). You can get this from the Quitline, from smoking cessation providers like me, from doctors or practice nurses, or over the counter at the supermarket or pharmacy. Through Quitline, smoking cessation providers and doctors, it’s Government-subsidised (it costs $3 to have the prescription filled at a pharmacy); otherwise it costs, I believe, about 10 times that much. About two-thirds of the NRT used was subsidised, indicating that people had had some interaction with a trained provider of some kind, even if only a volunteer on the Quitline. Around 47,000 NZ smokers still believe that NRT is more harmful than smoking cigarettes, though, and about 44,000 believe that it doesn’t improve smokers’ chances of quitting (significantly more women than men believe this). In case you’re wondering, the weight of the evidence is that these people are misinformed.
About 36,000 people in their most recent quit attempt used Quitline, more than any other service. Almost 17,000 went to their GP, 14,000 sought help or advice from a friend or family member, over 9,000 from some other healthcare worker apart from their doctor, and 4,500 from a Maori community health worker. (Around 4000 used hypnotherapy, if you look into the spreadsheets that give more detail – more women than men, and almost all in the older agegroups, which fits with my experience, although I have seen some younger women.) About 9,500 used Allen Carr’s book. But about two-thirds of the people who made a recent attempt to stop smoking used no products or advice at all.
Why is this? Well, when asked if they agreed with the statement “People should be able to quit without the help of programmes or products”, a third agreed and half disagreed. Significantly more men than women agreed with the statement, which surprises me not at all. There’s a mismatch between beliefs and behaviour, though. Half of smokers don’t agree that people should be able to stop without help, but two-thirds try to stop without help anyway. That means that at least 10% of smokers are trying to stop without help, even though they say they believe it won’t work.
They’re probably right, too. All the evidence shows that getting help, advice and support does increase the likelihood that smokers will be successful in stopping. Something which the survey fails to tell us (even in the detailed spreadsheets) is which methods were more successful for those who did stop and remain smokefree, but there’s other research on this: NRT about doubles your chances on average, being in a group is also good, and behavioural advice helps too. According to a 2008 study which I’ve blogged about before (Hypnosis for smoking cessation: A randomized trial), hypnotherapy, well-applied, also increases your chances of a successful outcome.
Hundreds of thousands of people in New Zealand alone try to stop smoking every year. Most of them don’t succeed, and this has to be frustrating, quite apart from the continued expense, the continued health risks and the increasing social isolation that smokers experience. In the coming months, I plan to announce an exciting new initiative to help smokers make that important transition to being permanent ex-smokers. Stay tuned.
A key part of my Positive Eating approach to weight management and nutrition is to help people increase their desire for foods that are rich in nutrients. Actually, to be more accurate, these foods are rich in micronutrients. The macronutrients – so called because they make up a large proportion of food by weight – are the energy nutrients: proteins, carbohydrates and fats. Micronutrients are the vitamins and minerals.
Many people think of food as fuel. It’s not, or at least, not solely. Macronutrients are turned into energy in our bodies, it’s true, but micronutrients (and for that matter protein) have other, equally important roles in constantly rebuilding the body and enabling it to function correctly. Somewhat loosely, foods rich in micronutrients are said to be nutrient-dense, while foods rich in macronutrients are said to be energy-dense.
The Nutrition Unplugged blog recently covered the upcoming update of the American dietary guidelines, which are largely focussed on moving from energy-dense to nutrient-dense foods. The rising incidence of obesity seems pretty clearly linked to the increase in energy density of the Western diet, particularly through components of highly processed food such as high-fructose corn syrup. And, as the post also notes, because these processed foods are very poor in micronutrients, it’s possible to be eating far too many calories on a daily basis and still not be meeting your recommended levels of micronutrients.
So, what’s the strategy? It boils down to eating more fruit and vegetables and less processed food. This is a message that’s been around for a long time, but it’s being focussed and emphasised more and more.
But isn’t that a really expensive way to eat? Is a nutrient-rich diet out of reach for the poorest members of the population? Perhaps not as much as we’ve tended to think. A 2005 study called A Nutrient Density Standard for Vegetables and Fruits: Nutrients per Calorie and Nutrients per Unit Cost, published in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association by Darmon, Darmon, Maillot and Drewnowski, used French data to show two key things. Firstly, there is indeed an inverse relationship between energy density and micronutrient density: foods high in energy tend to be low in micronutrients and vice versa. And secondly, if you measure nutrients per unit cost rather than energy per unit cost, fruits and vegetables are actually excellent value for money. Since it’s micronutrients that we’re typically short of, a diet high in fruit and vegetables is an ideal direction to head in.
There have also been calls recently to reduce (or even eliminate) animal products from our diets, on the grounds that farming animals contributes to global warming even more than industry does. The figures could be (and are being) debated; I would like to see, for instance, a calculation of the difference in emissions between the pre-19th-century American plainlands covered in herds of buffalo, and those same plainlands today covered in corn and soybean crops. But the general high-level principle is that the resource cost of producing animal-based foods is greater, and the health benefits of plant-based foods are also superior.
Unfortunately, people’s appetite for food generally tends towards energy-dense rather than nutrient-dense foods – a logical survival strategy when food is scarce, but these days, in general, it isn’t, and that strategy works against us. Hence my approach of helping people to shift their thinking and desires in a nutrient-rich direction.
As I mentioned a couple of months back, I spoke at the recent NZ Hypnotherapy Federation conference about pain management techniques. I didn’t speak from detailed notes, but here is an article based on what I said about hypnotherapy techniques for natural pain management.
The seven techniques I knew at the time (though not the five new ones I learned at the conference) are on the Natural Pain Management CD and downloads available in the new shop. Don’t forget, if you subscribe to the blog or my mailing list in November 2009 you’ll get a 10% discount on not just this, but everything in the shop – and mailing list subscribers continue to get discounts every month.
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