By: Shlomo Vaknin, C.Ht

The following story is another classic from Milton H. Erickson. I heard that one during a very intense practice group in the Hypnotherapy college. The teacher who told that story didn’t tell us in advance what it is all about. He said, “I have a little story to tell you, that might help you with your practice here today…”, and it worked like magic.

This is a very famous Erickson tale. It is about learning new skills, those that truly take a lot of time to learn. The kind of skills that when you only begin to practice them, you constantly fail. The best example I can give you is swimming. Not too long ago I learned another swimming style.

Although I knew how to swim, I always wanted to learn that specific style. At first, before I recalled I know NLP, it was a very complex set of actions. You have to move your hands and your arms differently, and all while keeping up with equal breathing, taking out your head outside the water and maintaining a strict form of swimming…

After the first lesson, I set down with the instructor and told him that on the next lesson it will certainly be different for me. I came back home, remembering I heard once a story about learning new hard to learn skills. After a bit of dusting, I found the tape of that lesson and couldn’t stop smiling.

On the next lesson it was like I just had 10 hours of practice in the pool. It seemed like my arms just went where they suppose to, without any conscious interference on my part. I actually enjoyed fixing little movements instead of worrying about the whole skill as one.

Now, this is only one example of how that story served me in my life. It also served me a lot in my private practice, though I did modify it quite a bit. I used the swimming story instead of Erickson’s walking story, or I would invent something as I felt was needed for the client.

Here’s the hypnotic story of Milton Erickson, save it and use it. It does produce great deal of accelerated learning:

“We learn so much at a conscious level and then we forget what we learn and use the skill. You see, I had a terrific advantage over others, I had polio, and I was totally paralyzed, and the inflammation was so great that I had a sensory paralysis too. I could move my eyes and my hearing was undisturbed. I got very lonesome lying in bed, unable to move anything except my eyeballs.