Notes

Any time you offer advice, that's going to be less effective than if you can throw them back, with appropriate explicit instructions, on their own resources to develop their own alternative ways.
This particular process differs significantly from normal therapeutic and hypnotic techniques. We simply serve as consultants for the person's conscious mind. He does all the work himself.
One of Milton Erickson's more useful definitions of deep trance is "a limited focus of attention inward." That's exactly what we asked Dick to do here — to limit his focus of attention to a signal which is internally generated. And the corresponding changes in the texture of his skin, breathing, skin color, lip size, etc., are all characteristic of what official hypnotists call trance phenomena.
Another is that people already have the resources they need in order to change, if they can be helped to have the appropriate resources in the appropriate context. A fourth one is that each and every single piece of behavior has a positive function in some context
135;One is that it's better to have choice than no choice, and another is the notion of unconscious choice.

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