The Piano by Lee Shuttlewood

As a Hypnotherapist and NLP Practitioner, I use a variety of techniques to help people to make changes in their lives that they often think are not possible. These changes can come about very quickly and I thought I’d write about a personal experience that made me realise how powerful and effective the techniques I use with my clients can be in helping them to realise their goals and dreams.

For many years, I have wanted to own a piano. I’d learned to play keyboards when I was younger and had always had one of those home keyboards that had the dodgy auto accompaniment that makes your playing sound like something that would not be out of place at the end of a pier or in the Tower Ballroom in Blackpool. I enjoyed learning to play the keyboard but my real passion was to have a piano so I could play “real” music. I wanted to be Jerry Lee Lewis, Oscar Peterson and Jools Holland (not all at the same time).

I always told myself that I would get a piano when I could afford one, when I had a bigger house, when it was practical. I made a list of excuses as to why I couldn’t have one. This list was so definite that I pretty much gave up on the whole idea of owning a piano and it was put to the back of my mind.

The idea of owning a piano stayed buried in the filing system of my mind (probably in the section marked “Regrets-Do not open until just before death”) until I attended my NLP Practitioner training at Know More Training.

At the training, the five of us in the class did various practical exercises and were given various demonstrations of NLP by the trainers. One of these demonstrations was an example of what is known as Parts Integration.

Have you ever been asked if you wanted to do something and your reply has been “Well part of me wants to, but another part is saying no” or have you ever wanted to do something like, for example, give up smoking but there is a part of you that just cannot manage without a cigarette? Well, that is where Parts Integration can be extremely effective.

The idea behind the technique of Parts Integration is that because both parts in conflict are within you, they have a positive intention behind what they do. Everything we do and believe has a positive intention behind it even if from the outside it seems illogical, dangerous, stupid or just plain weird. I’ll go back to the example of smoking - everyone knows it is bad for you, makes you smell and is an expensive habit, but people still carry on doing it. Why? Because it has a positive intention for the smoker such as relaxation, relief of boredom, makes them look hard, and so on. Until that Intention is identified and satisfied in a more constructive way, the person will continue to smoke. Finding out what that positive intention is can help to get the part that wants to smoke to integrate with the part that wants be a non-smoker and come up with a better way of doing things.

So there we were in the training room about to learn about Parts Integration. We were asked to come up with something that we were in conflict with and out came my mad notion of owning a piano and the conflict of “ooooh I’d really love a piano” versus “pianos are too expensive, where would you put it, how would you get it home, your not even that good at playing it, that’ll really annoy the neighbours……..” Notice how much longer the negative self-talk was?

Well, no one else seemed particularly keen on the idea of being a guinea pig and even though I thought my inner conflict was insignificant in the scheme of things, I somehow agreed to have my parts integrated.

To hear that demonstration click on this link (reproduced with kind permission from Denise and Jacob at Know More Training).

So, after ten minutes, Jacob had successfully integrated the conflicting parts. The outcome for me was that I realised that I could get a piano if I wanted to, that both parts just wanted me to be happy and that in my mind, all the reasons against having a piano were just excuses that I came up with to protect me. In short, I now could not understand what the problem was in the first place - Of course I could get a piano if I wanted to. In fact, I said to myself, I will get a piano and it will be great to have one and all those supposed barriers that I’d constructed to stop me could be easily removed. The other light bulb moment was when I realised that I didn’t necessarily have to have a piano right NOW. I could let it happen easily and sensibly so that any of those reasons I’d made up before could be tackled as and when (or if) they should appear.

About two months after my first experience of Parts Integration, I was the proud owner of a beautiful W.H. Barnes upright piano (built circa 1930) in a good cosmetic condition, with a couple of dodgy keys, in need of a good tuning and which I got for next to nothing on E-Bay. It fitted perfectly in the dining room and a couple of friends were happy to help me move it from it’s original home.

So you are probably wondering why I’m telling you all this. Well, I think it has taught me some very valuable lessons which I’m hoping will be apparent to you too - Firstly, that we have so much more control over our thoughts than we credit ourselves with and we can make changes very quickly - in only ten minutes, a set of limiting beliefs were eradicated. Imagine how powerful that can be when setting yourself goals or when trying to make changes in your life.

One more thing that I think is very important to remember is that often people want to make changes in their life, but think that their problem is silly, insignificant or that there are so many people in worse positions than them.

My answer to that is that you deserve to have the best life possible and there is no reason whatsoever to deny yourself of that!

Copyright 2008 Lee Shuttlewood- Hypnotherapist, NLP Practitioner & Coach | Sound Mind Systems Great Dunmow, Essex | E-mail | Web Site.