Utilization - A Life Saving Skill
(that everyone should know about!)
One of the most useful things I've ever learned is the concept of
"utilization". I came across this during an NLP training, and in brief, it means
that you take whatever is there and you make the most of it, in any way that you
can.
An example demonstrates this:
When I was still doing hypnotherapy with clients, I had a client booked one
fine August afternoon. We had the pre-chat, I started the induction and just as
the gentleman was about to go into trance, the Red Arrows Jet Display airplanes
came THUNDERING past my window.
Now this is an event that happens every year at the local air show which is
located some 300 yards away from my house on the beach; but I just hadn't
thought or realised when I made the appointment that it was Red Arrow Day - the
house shakes, the windows seem to be falling out of their sockets, all the birds
and the dogs in the neighbourhood go absolutely beserk and you can't even hear
yourself scream, never mind think when they make their thunderous passes.
I heard them coming, freaked out, remembered my utilisation, and told the
client: "And as you can feel the thundering approach in your body, let it shake
lose all your old entrained beliefs, and the louder it gets, the more you
benefit, and the harder it shakes, the deeper the trance ..."
The client went super-deep with the aid of 6 jet planes and every time
they passed by again, I used them again. The client LOVED the session, said he'd
never had such experiences with a hypnotherapist, and I remember this fondly as
one of the best hypno-changework sessions I've ever had the pleasure to partake
in.
Here's another example:
I was invited to give a lecture, and the stage was directly next to a door
which led to the kitchen. As I was starting my talk, there was a total RACKET of
clattering dishes and cuttlery and cries and screams rising above it all, and of
course that was massively distracting, not just for the audience who kept
looking from me to the door and back again about ten times a second, but also
for me because it felt as though each noise was chopping up my concentration.
There was nothing that could be done about the noise, so I turned to my old
friend utilization and told the audience, "With every clatter, every sound you
are becoming more intelligent, more awake, more aware and more concentrated on
the programme today." That was all it took - I completely forgot about the
clattering and screaming and the audience was right there with me, taking no
notice any longer. I asked them afterwards and they said that they had no
re-collection of what happened to the noise that was there at the beginning, nor
when or even if it ever stopped during the two hour lecture.
Cool ...
But utilisation doesn't only work when you are hypnotising people. It also
works BEAUTIFULLY for taking charge of yourself in moments of crisis.
In essence what you do is to leave the event be, accept it, don't argue it or
try and change it, but you take yourself and you change your position on the
event, quite literally, as a neurological movement. You get a different point of
view on the events that are happening, they begin to "mean" different things.
That is what utilisation is and that is what it does. If you can get a hold
of how A PERSON DOES THIS, you have a powerful tool for making the most of
reality, whatever that reality might be.
Here is another example that illustrates the concept of utilisation on a
personal level:
In the course of my research into magic, I decided to make a love potion. I
got the ingredients, stirred them in the pot, set the pot to boil and reduce -
and then promptly got involved in something else and forgot all about it.
When clouds of smoke finally broke through to my awareness, the love potion had
turned into crinkled pitch black soot in the bottom of the pan!
Oh NO!
Disaster!!
Wasn't it meant to be?
Was this all I would ever get instead of love, black burned on remnants?!
Was this a sign?!!
This is where one has to stop, take a deep breath and say, "Alright. Now it's
time to call UTILIZATION into play!"
Utilization is the art of taking ANYTHING AT ALL and make it BECOME whatever it
is that you want it to become.
That's a big part of magic, to take malleable reality and shape it to your WILL.
So I looked at the pot and said, "Fine. That's THE OLD LOVE."
"That's all the old stuff that happened to me, all the nasty stuff, all the
wrong ideas, the things that went wrong in the past - that is what that is. "
"I am going to take all that old nonsense and scrub the pan clean, and AS I
SCRUB THE PAN CLEAN, I CREATE A CLEAN SLATE WITHIN MYSELF, a fresh start, and a
new form of love altogether can now come to me."
So I set to scrubbing out the pan and as I did it, I kept chanting, "Clear up
the old, let the new unfold ..."
This was a very meditative and magical activity which I enjoyed immensely and I
could feel all sorts of things falling away around me, as the pan become bright
shiny silver once more.
When it was all perfectly clean, I put it back on the stove and started again.
This time, all worked perfectly well and the second, NEW love potion was
actually a whole lot better than the first attempt. I am extremely pleased with
the potion and the outcome of it all.
Remember this story when it seems that a spell's gone wrong or you've made a
mess, made a mistake, didn't get it right, and all those doubts come creeping or
crashing in - THAT'S when a real magician stands firm in mind, and spirit, and
in outcome, and takes the situation and turns it to their advantage.
(Excerpt From
Magic Tips)
Utilization is a *fantastic* skill.
It really is. I could go on and on giving examples of situations
that could have been absolutely disastrous for all concerned - if I hadn't
remembered to use that amazing magic trick and "turn the events to my
advantage".
It requires only a little mental flexibility, and the process
starts with seeing that something is NOT as you expected it to be AND that
there's not a damned thing YOU can do about it.
There was no way to stop the Red Arrows; no way to stop the
hotel staff from clattering their dishes; no way of turning back the clock and
un-burning the love potion.
"When the going gets tough, the tough get going ..." - yeah,
with utilization.
The truly amazing thing about the utilization processes is that
each time I employed them, not only did it RESCUE the dire situation and prevent
a long term disaster - but in the contrary, the END RESULT was better than if
the disaster had never occurred in the first place!
Think about that for a moment. Each time, utilization took an
ordinary event and lifted it up to a totally different level, and extraordinary
things happened as a result. The client and I were really blown away by "the
power of Hypnosis - PLUS the Red Arrows Display Team"! If the kitchen hadn't
clattered, I would not have thought to give my audience post hypnotic
suggestions up front to enhance their learning experiences. If the love potion
No. 1 hadn't burned, I would never have gotten to work with "old entrenched
beliefs" nor would have spent all that time thoroughly letting the old go before
starting on the new - resulting in the massively superior love potion No. 2.
It seems to me that the creative order gave us the ability to
move consciousness in such a way that we don't just make lemonade out of lemons,
but in fact, magic potions and triumphs out of what only *appeared* to be lemons
because we didn't know better!
So and the next time something happens that seems to be
specifically designed to annoy you, derail you, upset you or if things just go
massively wrong somehow, see if you can step back and ask yourself, "How can I
use this to my advantage? How I can use this event to not just keep on going in
the same direction, but to add something extra, make it special, actually HELP
ME do this EVEN BETTER than before?"
This is definitely a much, much better approach to life than to
whinge and whine about how awful it all was when it all went hideously wrong.
Utilization is a brilliant, massively useful and absolutely
delightful skill.
Practise it often, so when the time comes, you too can turn a
crisis into a triumph - and feel on top of the world because you know you've
done something that's even better than just "the right thing".
SFX May 2007
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