The surprising power of your beliefs. A Happy Hour Conversation with Jorgen Rasmussen

This week's show is with Jorgen Rasmussen, who has seen clients professionally as an agent of change for twenty years, the first eight spent running an "Impossibles practice" with a 'no change, no pay' policy.

Having deeply explored NLP, hypnosis, non-duality teachings, developmental psychology and meditation, he is the Author of the books Provocative Hypnosis (2008) and Provocative Suggestions (2015).

In this show, Jorgen and I explored the possibilities for humans that things like hypnosis, the placebo effect, and multiple personality disorders (in some ways a form of self-hypnosis) show us - I find it super intriguing how much power the human mind has over the reality that’s created. Does it only have that power when we truly believe the thought? How does hypnosis even work? And what does that tell us about the human mind consciousness more broadly?

I’d love to know what YOU think about this week's show. Let’s carry on the conversation…  please leave a comment below.

What you'll learn from this episode:

• The capacity for hypnosis relies on absorption (the ability to be completely absorbed in an experience - for example a movie), disassociation (feeling separate from the experience, for example an artist saying that their hand painted the painting, it didn't seem to be them making it happen), suggestibility (the ability to make an experience feel completely real). Most of us will have these qualities in varying degrees and around 5-10% of people are highly hypnotisable.

• Most of us engage in rather a lot of self-deception. Our mind creates a belief and then we try to rationalise why we have that belief, which only confirms and solidifies it further, when actually we don't usually form beliefs through logic and reason.

• When we believe something it can completely change our experience, even to the extent of our physical processes. This can be particularly powerful when its a belief that's been implanted by an expert, such as when it comes to a diagnosis or a prognosis made by a doctor to a patient. It's wonderful that the reverse can also happen like the example that Jorgen gave of his client who marched out of his office but then returned weeks later free from depression!