"Failure is impossible." -Susan B. Anthony
This past weekend I attended a training conference on Ericksonian Hypnosis and Brief Positive Psychotherapy. It was taught by a gentleman named Ron Klein and I probably learned as much from watching him deal with the disruptive and derailing "elements" in the group as I did from his actual presentations on the topic.
One of the things that I discovered over the weekend was that, apart from the residual difficulties stemming from my injuries, there isn't all that much that I'd really like to change. This stemmed from his asking for volunteers who had something relatively simple that they would like to change about themselves. Granted, there are plenty of things that would like to change but they are BIG things, not something you can hypnotize away. In defense of the program and the process, we weren't learning to hypnotize anything "away". That's not how it works. In any case there were plenty of people who had phobias, and smoking habits and inabilities to deal with confrontation or loud noises, etc., and it made me look at myself and I realized that I was willing to face my demons directly and didn't want to have them miraculously disappear. I realized that if I wanted to change something about myself, I could do it myself.
That alone was worth the price of admission.
Again, don't get me wrong. I am not perfect. I just wasn't there for a quick fix. Although I did have to come up with something for one of the exercises and I chose going down stairs. The vision changes I experienced after the accident altered my depth perception. I also still have double vision in my right eye. This tends to make walking down steps a bit challenging. Before I found a Neuro-opthalmologist, which took over a year, I got in the habit of going down stairs like a blind person. As I lowered my foot onto the next step, I would "check" the location of the step with my heel, pushing it back against the upright of the step. In essence, I was feeling my way down the stairs. I also had a bad habit of looking down and always felt like I wasn't quite sure where my feet were going to land.
My goal during my turn as the client was: I want to go down stairs confidently and agilely.
That night after dinner, I burned off the extra calories by dashing up and down the fire stairs at the hotel.
Yes, I'm saying that it worked. It worked well. This isn't the cure for everything, but it sure seems like a valuable tool to put in my bag of future tricks. The other thing I took away from the weekend was the idea that there is no failure, only feedback. It's a good way to look at things. One that is important when dealing with life changing injuries and chronic illnesses.
When there is no failure, anything is possible.
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