My Irish ancestors have a saying “If you don’t know where you’re going, you might end up somewhere else.”

Clients come for therapy “because of some discontent with the present and a desire to better their future” to quote Erickson, and instead of asking “What’s wrong that needs fixing?”, we can ask “What’s missing, that if you had it you’d be OK?”.

Finding what’s missing for each individual client give a direction to our conversation.

Erickson told me “When a client comes to see you, they always bring their solution with them, only they don’t know that, so have a very nice time, talking with your clients, helping them to find the solution that they brought that they didn’t realise that they brought.”

If we begin a session by asking “What do you like to do?”, clients find themselves in a resourceful state. If they didn’t have resources to hand to manage any disruption, they would hardly like what they are doing.

If we then ask “What do you like about that?”, we, and the client can discover the unique deep connection they have with this activity.

Clients come with problems, and asking what aspect of the problem is particularly problematic can lead us to an individual experience and avoid the deadening trap of diagnosing a condition.

So … if we know what’s missing for each individual client, and we know where to look for it … the stage is set for a respectful and easy hypnosis experience for a client to realise their own unique solution.

How do we do that? Next …

Rob McNeilly