Hi

I've just completed my NLP practitioner course and have seen 3 people for smoking cessation.
I was able to cause short term results and then for some reason all started smoking again.
I found that when they had a drink or where out with smoking friends that they relapsed.
I feel that in my training with Mckenna/Bandler, we didn't cover enough of what questions to ask when someone comes to you with a problem or challenge.
I asked....
How do you do this?
When do you do this?
How is this a problem and worked from there.
I have heard people talk of taking a detailed personal history that can take up to 3 hours??
What advice can you give me in regards to the smokers, I plan to ask each one when they return what happened.

Thanks in Advance
Love this site!

Sally

Detailed Personal History is usually a Master Practitioner technique taught as part of the breakthrough session

If the person has underlying beleifs around smoking it is important to get these out otherwise if these beleifs kick in the person can start smoking again - so the effects appear short term - the session has worked it the beleifs that have kicked in

Hi Sally,

I've done a lot of changework and I've got say that I've never spent that long talking with the client about anything, let alone their past history! I spend most of my time getting them to stop talking about their past history...

This is not to disparage those who use past history as part of what they do. I'm just saying that it's never been something that I've needed to do personally.

Smoking is a behavior that people do. All behaviors are usually linked to 'trigger events' or, to put it another way, environmental anchors in some way or other.

So, I'm going to assume the you're ready know how to get people to stop smoking as you did get them stop smoking for a while, anyway. Most of what I'll focus on here is the work that you might want to do at the end of the changework.

It can be useful to take the time and future pace them to several times in their future. Allow their unconscious mind to decide when and where they decide to drop down to experience times in the future when they are in situations where, in the past, they would have wanted to smoke but now see themselves successfully breathing freely in those contexts.

Because you're not asking them about these situations, nor are you suggesting to them what the situations are like, this is a content free way of allowing them to find their own environmental anchors and collapse them for themselves.

Certainly it can be useful to look for secondary gain or limiting beliefs, but only if, in my opinion, the client says or does something to indicate that those might be issues.

As in most cases, the client will tell you and show you exactly what they need to change and change permanently. If you listen to their process and you listen to the deep structure underneath what ever they happen to be telling you is, they'll hand the complete procedure to you every time.

It's also useful to test your work in a real-life situation. Let your client take you into the environment where they relapsed, down at the pub or at a nightclub or wherever. Watch them interact with their environment. get them to do all the sorts of things that they would normally do before smoking and experience the difference of doing those things as a non-smoker.

If your client experiences all the differences and has no troubles, fine, you know you're done. If they have cravings, then you know the you still have some work to do.

By the way, I'm not suggesting the you have to go out drinking with every client you help to stop smoking... I usually only do this level of testing with people who's congruity with the results I'm not 100% sure about. If I get an instinct, I'll take them out and test it 'in the wild', to use a term from IT.

That's been my experience, at any rate. I do wish you well and let us know how you get along with de-smoking your non-smokers again...

Be Well,

Michael Perez