I had a medical training and was in a suburban family medicine practice in Melbourne, Australia, for 10 years. It was wonderful to be a part-time member of so many families with their suffering and their illnesses and their troubles and to be able to support them and help them. 

One of the outstanding joys was the amazing experience of being present and helping the delivery of hundreds of babies. It was a highlight of my medical practice. And, while I really enjoyed that work, while I really enjoyed contributing to people and helping to support them with their physical problems and their troubles, I found that I was completely inadequately prepared to deal with their human dilemmas, When someone had some emotional problem, when they were frightened unnecessarily, when they were depressed or worried unnecessarily, when they had physical pain, the best I could do was offer some tablets. 

This deficeit led me to explore hypnosis. My initial introduction was through a very traditional  approach where I learnt that hypnosis was something you needed to be very careful of since it was special and dangerous. This meant that a lot of training was required so the special skills could be learnt before you could even begin. 

I learnt a formula. You ask someone to look at a spot, ask them to relax their toes and progressively relax the rest of their body. You then tell them that their eyes are getting heavier, they are getting sleepy, they’re going to close their eyes. And then, when that happened, to issue instructions: “You won't do that, you will do this. In future, you won’t be able to have the problem. Instead, you will have this solution - one resulting from my special understanding. It was like a psychic operation in which the hypnosis was an anaesthetic where you put someone out, put them under, put them to sleep, make them unconscious so you could do the psychic surgery and excise the problem. 

I noticed that this was very effective with some people, but there were others who didn’t take to it and, in my ignorance, I labelled these people as being resistant, not ready, not willing, having secondary gain, completely missing the fact that it was my incompetence that was causing the stuckness. I was also bored, using the same repetitious patter, hour after hour. Sometimes I even had trouble staying awake. 

All of this changed when I had the great fortune and privilege of hearing about Milton Erickson, seeing Herb Lustig’s wonderful film of him working [The Artistry of Milton H Erickson MD] and then in the last few years of his life meeting him, spending some time with him, getting to know him and be known by him, learning directly from him. What I learnt in my time with Erickson revolutionised my approach to hypnosis and had a massive influence over the effectiveness of what I was able to offer. 

Erickson assumed that people had resources. He assumed that each person was the expert, knew more about themselves than they realised, more than we could ever know. This shifted the focus from me as having to pretend to be an expert, to the role of helping the client to regain their expertness. It was like my experience in general practice of helping women to deliver their babies. I didn’t need to be an expert at pregnancy. I’d never been pregnant, never likely to be pregnant. My job was to do whatever I could to allow the process of giving birth to be as natural and as unimpeded as possible so that the natural process could just run its course. 

This then became my job as a therapist - to help remind the client they have the capacity, help them to find a way of connecting with that capacity, reconnecting with preferred experiences so that they could have access to them. My job was to generate a mood of expectancy and trusting, of lightness, of possibility. It revolutionised my attitude to hypnosis which became so much more effective and enjoyable. Instead of being wrung out and bored at the end of the day, I frequently felt enlivened. 

And like any experience that we enjoy, that we are taken by; any experience that we find touches us, I began to share this experience with others. And over the last 35 years or so, I've been offering workshops face to face in different parts of the world and, more recently, online, helping to share this approach, my version of what Erickson did … my expression of what I learnt from my time with this man. A lot of people have told me that they find that  learning this approach, learning in this way, is of huge benefit to their practice and to their person. 

In writing this book I'm offering a guide, so that as a reader you can have an opportunity to see what might be useful, to see what might be helpful to explore, to adapt, to translate. I want to emphasise that I am not in any way claiming that what this book is about is the right, the best, the only way of doing something. It is simply offered as my observation, of my experience so that anyone reading it can try it out, use it, adapt it or even do the opposite of what I'm suggesting here. 

After more than 30 years I am increasingly enchanted by what Erickson’s approach makes available. My appreciation has only expanded over time ... and that is me and my experience. 

My invitation to you is to enjoy your reading of what I've written, what I've shared, then to use it, to change it, to throw it out, or do anything that can be useful for you and your learning. I'm very grateful to have the opportunity to share this work and I'm very grateful for you to take the time and read it with the possibility of adding to your effectiveness and your personal satisfaction.