Darren Jamieson:
This week on The Engaging Marketeer, I’m speaking to Turan Mirza from Feelgood Hypnosis.
As the name suggests, Turan is a hypnotist who helps people get over fears and things in their lives that they want to change. It could be as simple as biting your nails or a fear of spiders, which I definitely have both of those, or it could be something more debilitating or unusual.
So, I’m going to be talking to Turan about hypnosis, about how you can become a hypnotist, whether anybody is able to be hypnotised, and the link between hypnosis and sales, which is closer than you probably think.
So, let’s get in there and find out more about Feelgood Hypnosis.
One thing I would like to know, a lot of people ask hypnotists, can anybody be hypnotised? But I would rather ask, can anybody be a hypnotist? Can anybody have that power?
Turan Mirza:
You can ask both questions.
Darren Jamieson:
Well, let’s start off. Can anybody be a hypnotist?
Turan Mirza:
So, can anybody become a hypnotist? Hypnosis is a strange thing. My name is Turan Mirza, and people think, “Oh, this is some mystic East special art,” or that I’m a seventh son of a seventh son and they have to be special in some way to do this stuff.
Anybody can do it. Now, I say that in the context of anybody could be a ballerina. Anybody could be an astronaut. But if you have no inclination to be a ballerina, if you never want to go into space, you’ll never be an astronaut. You’ll never be a ballerina.
So, you’ve got to want it. Like any interest, hobby, profession, you’ve got to have that, “Oh, I’m curious about this here. I’d like to do this.” But if you have that curiosity, then you can do it.
Darren Jamieson:
So, what’s the training like in order to be able to become a hypnotist?
Turan Mirza:
The training. Where do I start? I mean, the training is the training. It’s basically explaining how hypnosis works, doing practical demonstrations.
I always say to people, if you’re learning to juggle, you can go into the kitchen when nobody’s about and you can grab three oranges out of the fruit bowl and practice. If you drop one, just put it back in the fruit bowl. Never let on.
But with hypnosis, you need people. You need that interaction. It is all about communication and human interaction. Sadly, you can’t, when people tell me, “Can you hypnotise my dog to stop barking?” It is about communications and human interaction. So you need that face-to-face play with other people.
Is that enough? Because hypnosis is a wide range. As much as you’re asking, what’s the training like, I’ll say the phrase, I’ve been doing this since 2010, so 16 years now, and I’m still going to conventions and learning new subtleties, new techniques, new nuances.
So, it’s like most professions. There’s a never-ending journey to learning and picking up. It’s not just one thing that you learn quickly and you’re done.
But within a couple of days, I do an introduction training, and within a couple of days you can be out sticking people’s feet to the floor. That sort of entertainment, to understand how hypnosis works really, you can be doing that after just a couple of days.
I’m not going to say you’re going to be a seasoned hypnotherapist in trauma and other things, but the basics are basic.
Darren Jamieson:
And are you allowed to tell us some of the techniques, or is that kind of, tell it all as long as you pay me?
Turan Mirza:
Well, you are paying me with being on a podcast.
Darren Jamieson:
What can you tell me?
Turan Mirza:
The bottom line is, coming back to can anybody be a hypnotist, everybody is a hypnotist.
When you see, in a superstore, Tesco, Sainsbury’s, whatever, and you’re walking past and, I don’t want to be too sexist, a parent, I won’t say mother or father, a parent says, “Shut up. You’re always noisy in these shops.”
That’s a suggestion when that child is in a focused state of attention. And that suggestion is more likely to land as a belief and a truth.
“I’m always noisy in a shop. I’m always misbehaved in a shop.” And then you just become misbehaved in a shop because that’s the facts of life. That’s what you’re told you are. So you become what you’re told.
Again, I don’t want to go too deep in it. There are aspects of the training worth going through the whole training, but getting someone in that focused state of attention and giving a direct suggestion can be as straightforward as that there.
An interesting anecdote. I was working with an 11-year-old for fear of roller coasters, of all things. The parents were based in Northern Ireland, but they would fly over to England, to Alton Towers, and go to Disney World in Paris and Florida, wherever. They loved it, and the child loved the thought of getting on them, but couldn’t get on them.
So I worked with the young boy. It was a home visit. Now, for safeguarding and for taking notes, I like to video record the sessions. I was taking my camera out and he went, “Oh, I’ve got a YouTube channel,” when he saw my camera.
I said, “That’s cool. You’ve got a YouTube channel.”
Then the mum said, “You two can work in the dining room.”
I said, “Well, I like the parent to be there.”
She said, “Well, we discussed it, and he’s happy enough with just you and him.”
So there are two elements. I like the mother to be involved and see what’s happening, and I like the child to know he has mum in the room. There were the two aspects of it, but I went in anyway because it was agreed. I didn’t want to argue at that point with the child or the mother.
Basically, we sorted out the fear of roller coasters within 20 minutes. Dare I say it, almost a bit of anxiety on my part. I thought, if I go out and she hasn’t seen what’s happened and the change, so I thought, well, I’ll have a bit of a chat with him.
I said, “You tell us about your YouTube channel.”
He picked up a tablet that was in the dining room and he said, “There’s my YouTube channel.”
I said, “Play it. Play one of the videos. Let me see what you do.”
He hesitated and I said, “What’s wrong?”
He said, “Well, I don’t like the sound of my own voice.”
And it went, “Brilliant. We’ll work on that as well.”
So, I worked on that and then we watched the videos. He was a lot happier about listening to his own voice. I’m sure you get that a lot with podcasts and whatever else. People don’t like the sound of their own voice.
So I went out to mum later on.
She said, “Well, how’s it going?”
I said, and I’ll change names for privacy, “Well, little Johnny, what do you think of the roller coaster?”
He said, “Yeah, I can’t wait to get on my next roller coaster.”
He went off to his room, and I said, “We actually worked on something else.”
She obviously went, “Well, what else was wrong with my son? I didn’t think he had any others.”
“Well, he didn’t like the sound of his own voice.”
She said, “Well, who does?”
I went, “Ah. You’ve clearly taught him that.”
She put her hand to her mouth and said, “I never taught him that.”
I said, “You don’t need to stare him in the eyes and swing a pocket watch and say, ‘You will not like the sound of your own voice.’ He can be watching cartoons while you and your husband are eating, or doing something, and you might say to your husband, ‘Oh, nobody likes the sound of their own voice.’ He’ll pick up on that. You are a person of authority, like a teacher, a parent, and if you say something with conviction, he’ll pick up on that.”
I met up with the mum a couple of weeks later and she said, “I’ve been telling all the parents at the school gates, picking up the kids, that we’re hypnotising our kids,” which they are, in a way.
There’s also the aspect of people saying, “Well, I need to be very careful if I’m going to be hypnotising.” It’s just language. It’s just communication. It’s just being aware that people hear things that you think they’re not listening to.
Darren Jamieson:
So the positive and negative reinforcement we get at home all the time in our youth, that’s a form of hypnotising?
Turan Mirza:
That’s it.
Darren Jamieson:
So any fear or belief that somebody has ingrained into them can be removed by hypnosis?
Turan Mirza:
Think about fear of airplanes, fear of flying. When you think about it, I think it’s just past 100 years, the airplane and the Wright brothers and whatever. So we couldn’t have inherited this from a great-great-great-grandfather because planes didn’t exist back then.
Fears are learned behaviours. We’re not born with these things. Whether it’s fear of spiders, especially in the UK, they’re not poisonous, unless something escapes from the zoo or somebody has a tarantula for a pet. But, generally speaking, domestic spiders are not poisonous, are not dangerous, and yet people have these great fears.
It’s a very popular fear for hypnosis. So you’ve learned that. It might be as simple as, as a baby, your mum, who also had a fear of spiders, jumped up on a chair and screamed, “Ah, there’s a spider. Get it out.” And the baby’s going, “That’s how you respond to a spider.”
So that is non-verbal hypnosis in itself. Just the action of jumping and screaming is saying, “Right, this is how I should act when I see a spider.”
The good news is, if you learn something, you can unlearn it.
Darren Jamieson:
I’d never looked at it like that.
As I understand it then, from an anthropological point of view, when we are born, we only have two inbuilt fears, which, as I’ve been told, are loud noises and falling. Falling could stem from when we used to live in trees, falling out of the tree, and loud noises is fear of danger.
As they are the only two inbuilt fears that we are born with, that babies have, can they be overcome with hypnosis as well?
Turan Mirza:
It’s interesting you say that, and again, I don’t want to go down into the university studies and white papers and stuff, but I saw a video one time where they took this two-month-old baby and placed it on this glass platform way up high. The baby didn’t know. It had just learned to crawl, so it’s just crawling along the glass platform, no fear.
Then six months later, when it was a bit more accustomed to the world, same or similar, more mature babies, now they were a bit, “Oh, I might fall here.”
So there’s almost that aspect of, yeah, it’s a popular thing, fear of falling is one of the two, as well as loud noise. Chances are even that’s not ingrained into us.
But yes, bottom line is, whether it is or isn’t, I don’t know. Splitting hairs and arguing those points. The bottom line is most of the things, fears and phobias, are learned responses.
Darren Jamieson:
Because the most common one in my industry, and I’ve spoken to a lot of people on this podcast, is a fear of public speaking.
Turan Mirza:
Yeah.
Darren Jamieson:
So, it’s fears, death, taxes and public speaking. How would you get somebody over a fear of public speaking?
Turan Mirza:
Same way. Again, I don’t want to simplify it too much. It almost degrades the profession, but I say I specialise in one thing, and that’s changing people’s minds.
Whether you’re a smoker and you want to be a non-smoker, I’ll change your mind. If you’re nervous about public speaking and you want to be confident about public speaking, it’s the same process, in commas, with a variety of techniques to do that same process.
You have a way of thinking, and I need to change the way you think about that.
Everybody’s different. Every smoker’s different. Every fear of public speaking is different.
I was working with one person whose fear came from when they were 16 and had done terribly in an exam. The teacher made him stand up and recite his terrible essay in front of the whole class, and needless to say, people found it funny. He felt that embarrassment and now didn’t want to feel that embarrassment.
Again, everything is about feelings. Everything’s about feelings.
If you feel anxious about getting on an airplane, that’s a fear of flying or a phobia of flying. If you feel anxious about approaching a spider, that’s a feeling you get every time you see that spider. If you have anger management issues, you have a feeling that niggles at you and makes you angry.
So, it’s about tapping in and understanding those feelings and changing the way you feel about that situation.
Darren Jamieson:
And finding the root cause of that feeling, what it was that brought that on in the first place.
Turan Mirza:
That’s it.
The key thing is, the beauty about hypnosis compared to cognitive behavioural therapy, psychology or psychotherapy, is hypnosis is about you changing that.
I often say that it’s like me being a director. I’ll claim the analogy as me being Steven Spielberg. Maybe you, as the client, would be Liam Neeson. I’m the director and I say, “Liam, look off camera and say the line.”
But it’s up to you to create that performance. It’s up to you. I don’t think Steven Spielberg should move your upper lip a bit, or down a bit, or move your nose to the side, or raise one eyebrow. I don’t think the director does that level of detail. He just says, “Right, now say it intensely,” or “Say it with a bit of humour,” whatever, depending on the line.
So, I’m the director and giving you guidance, and then you make the change inside your own mind.
Again, popular myth is that hypnotists are probing inside your mind. I mean, you laugh, but people with serious faces have said, “I don’t want you probing inside my mind.”
This is people with anxieties. “I’d love to get rid of this problem, but I don’t want you probing inside my mind.” I don’t disrespect them for saying that because it’s all over the movies.
Darren Jamieson:
I was just about to say, yeah, that’s influenced by film, isn’t it? We see things like Charles Xavier and the X-Men doing that, and we think that’s what hypnotists are.
Turan Mirza:
That’s it. They’ve been hypnotised by the movies.
I’ll get people that, again, you said you’re not going to ask can anybody be hypnotised, but I’ve had people saying, “Well, I can’t be hypnotised.”
I say, “Well, how do you know?”
“Well, I went to this comedy stage show and I had a few drinks on me and I got up on stage, and I wasn’t going under at the same time as everybody else. So the hypnotist said, ‘You can’t be hypnotised. Go sit down.’”
Now, at the risk of knocking anyone in my fellow profession, he phrased that badly in a stage show.
You want to keep a pace because you’re not just hypnotising someone and giving that individual an experience. You’re giving the audience some entertainment as well.
Some people will drop within 20 seconds. I’ve got a video on YouTube where somebody goes into hypnosis in 20 seconds. Some people will take three minutes. Some people can take a bit longer.
So, in a stage show environment, you want everybody. You don’t want them all out for the count and you’re still working for the next three minutes on this one individual.
For stage management purposes, if you get eight people up and one’s not going under, you’ll have a nice show for the crowd with these seven, and you say, “Maybe another time. Go and watch. You’ll enjoy it more.”
That’s the better way for a stage hypnotist to say it. But if he’s in a hurry and says, “You can’t be hypnotised. Go and sit down,” the fact is, everybody can be hypnotised.
It’s just some people take longer. Some people take a slightly different technique.
So if that person walks away feeling they can’t be hypnotised, the irony is they’ve been hypnotised into believing they can’t be hypnotised.
Darren Jamieson:
Oh, now we’re getting deep.
Turan Mirza:
Now we’re getting into loops of loops.
Darren Jamieson:
Yeah. So they’re now telling people all the time, “I can’t be hypnotised because I was at this stage show at Butlin’s and I can’t be hypnotised.”
Turan Mirza:
That’s it.
Again, I don’t want to pre-empt questions if you’re going to ask this, but is there anybody who can’t be hypnotised? Everybody can be hypnotised, but if you don’t want to be hypnotised, it will not work that day.
So, if you get up on the stage saying, “Oh, this sounds like fun,” especially if you’ve got a few drinks, and then you get up on stage and you don’t have enough drinks, again, alcohol plays a factor in inability to be hypnotised.
But if you get up on stage and you go, “Oh, I thought there were like 20 people in the audience. There’s like 400 in the audience. This is a bit too embarrassing. I don’t mind making a fool of myself in front of 20 people, but not in front of 400.”
If you get that on you now, anything I’m trying to do with you as the hypnotist, you’re not listening to because you’re just going, “Oh, this is going to be embarrassing.”
And if that’s running through your mind, you will stop yourself from enjoying the experience and being hypnotised.
So it’s not that you can’t be hypnotised, but maybe another day. Or if you wanted to stop smoking and you’re going one-to-one, it would work perfectly, but not on a stage, or vice versa even.
Darren Jamieson:
Okay.
So, if hypnotism is essentially, and you said you don’t want to oversimplify it, but essentially suggesting to people, you’re telling them something and they’re believing it, and if they’re being told something by somebody else and they believe it, they are in a sense hypnotised to believe that.
Turan Mirza:
Yeah.
Darren Jamieson:
Where is the line between hypnotism and sales? Because I’ve seen a lot of people who’ve done NLP, neuro-linguistic programming, and they use that in a sales capacity.
They’ll be on a stage and they’ll be telling people that, you know, “This is your dream. This is what you need to achieve. In order to achieve this, you need to sign up to my course.”
They’re using language which is conditioning the audience to make them want to buy it, to make them believe that buying it is going to give them their dreams.
Where’s the fine line between hypnotism and sales in that capacity? Or is there one? Or is there a line at all?
Turan Mirza:
Is there a line at all? When you really get into studying hypnosis, and like I said, I go to a lot of conventions, I read a lot on things, hypnosis is communication. It’s just another word for communication.
There is an element of getting someone into that focused state.
I would almost say, again, as I’ve already mentioned, parents. Richard Bandler, who was one of the founders of NLP, he’s famous for saying, and you might be too young for a thing called a VHS.
Darren Jamieson:
I’ve got VHSs right here, genuinely.
Turan Mirza:
Most of his material is either ripped onto MP4s from VHSs, or I’ve seen them, dare I say, on VHSs.
He’s famous for saying that he was told in school by a teacher, by the music teacher, “You’re rubbish at music. You’ll never be any good.” And because of that, for years, he didn’t attempt it.
But during the 80s and 90s, he had a series of TV shows and he wrote the score for his TV shows.
So he relays that story and says, if it wasn’t for just overcoming that suggestion. You’ve got someone whose authority you respect, whether it’s a teacher, a doctor.
Even, dare I say, I know it’s controversial and people talk about this with the old COVID thing, but when I was going in getting jabs and she said, “This might hurt a little bit,” I said, “For some people, does it hurt for everyone?”
She said, “No, it doesn’t hurt for everyone.”
So you could say, “This might be comfortable for you,” because if 40% of the people feel it comfortable and 60% say, “Oh, it hurt,” then saying “This might hurt,” you’re only talking about 60% of the people.
What’s to stop you from saying, “Well, you might find this pretty comfortable”?
It’s the difference between your boss coming to you for a performance review and saying, “Let’s see the areas where you need improvement,” as opposed to the boss coming in and saying, “Let’s highlight where you’re going well.”
It’s the same conversation, but we’re focusing on the 40% of the things that you do wrong, or the 60% of things that you do fantastically and should get a pay rise for.
You walk out going, “40% of things I do are rubbish.” Yeah, but what about the other 60? If you walk out of the room focusing on the negative, this is all NLP suggestion. Focused state of attention on where you’re focusing your attention.
So opening that door to another way of thinking can really change how you think.
Darren Jamieson:
Because you see it done in sales all the time. I use it.
Give the crudest example. If you’re speaking to a prospective client, and people in shops will do this as well if they’re trying to make a sale for a car or something, rather than say, “Would you like to go ahead with it or not?” they would say, “Would you like to pay in full or pay by the payment option?”
Turan Mirza:
Exactly. There’s what we call, and again I’m going to say in hypnosis, but it’s just a presupposition, an assumption that you are going to buy, and are you going to buy it in full or are you going to buy it in payments?
Darren Jamieson:
Yeah, the assumptive close.
Turan Mirza:
That’s it. So it becomes a close. It makes your mind think differently. That’s the language. That’s the real skill.
There are other elements of hypnosis worth learning about, but at the crux of it, that’s it.
Darren Jamieson:
Here’s a question. Where does that stand ethically if people are using that within sales to take money from people? Is it ethical to be using NLP or hypnosis techniques when you’re making a sale to someone?
Turan Mirza:
Again, it comes back to the idea that I said earlier. If you don’t want to be hypnotised, you won’t be hypnotised.
If you really don’t want to buy that car, and I’m sure as I say this you’re now thinking of examples, when somebody says, “Do you want it in red or do you want it in blue?” “I don’t want it.”
So if they definitely don’t want it, they can resist.
The ethics, people were making these statements long before somebody sat with a notebook and said, “You know what? If you keep repeating that, you’ll get better results.”
Yes, hypnosis, dare I say, is ancient Egyptians, ancient Chinese. There’s nothing new. You’ll see new courses coming, new form of hypnosis this and hypnosis that. Ultimately, it’s an ancient thing and it’s since the moment somebody opened their mouth.
If I make a statement like, holding a battery, “This battery isn’t the most powerful battery in the world,” and you’re glancing at it, I’m not telling you the brand and waving it about, but you’re glancing at it. It’s a black bottom and a copper top. Next time I see one in the shops, I’m influencing you.
Ultimately, it comes down to intent. I think ultimately it comes down to intent.
If I’m intending to tell you a line and reinforcing it with a variety of these techniques, but if you come into a car showroom, I didn’t drag you kicking and screaming. You come into a car showroom, I’m going to go, “Right, he wants a car. So I’ll make him happy if he buys a car. If he walks out with a car, I’ll obviously make my boss happy if he walks out with a car today, and my boss will be even happier if he buys it from us.”
So, is it ethical or is it unethical if he starts using these techniques to help that person realise what he wants and feel good about it? It comes back to the feeling. All these techniques are really to give you a feeling of certainty and a feeling of happiness with what you’re doing.
Darren Jamieson:
I think I asked that question because I’ve seen a lot of salespeople who are selling to somebody who didn’t know they were going to be sold to.
Timeshare presentations, for example. Timeshare salespeople in there, say what you like about them, but they are skilled. They are really good at selling the dream and the benefit, and they know exactly what to say, when to say it, and when to shut up as well.
Turan Mirza:
And many of them haven’t been in hypnosis training. Many of them haven’t been on NLP training. Somebody’s taught them this knack, or even they’ve just intuitively picked up, if I say this in this way, people will be more likely to close the deal.
So again, yeah, there’s an ethical issue of using hypnosis in a way to deceive.
That applies to anything. One of the things I’ll say in the training, insights into the training, is hypnosis is a very powerful thing. You can do a lot of things with hypnosis, but you can also do a lot of things with accountancy. Accountancy is a very powerful thing. A bad accountant can make you jump off a building because you lost all your money.
They can siphon money out of you and be devious and all the rest of it. So should we be just as worried about accountancy as we are hypnosis? Nobody sees it in that way.
Again, what I’m doing is an NLP technique of framing it.
Childminding is a very noble thing. It’s letting the parents go to work and earn money, but if they just sit and watch TV and smoke cigarettes around the kids, that’s a terrible thing.
So childcare is a very powerful thing. You could do a lot of good for it. You could do a lot of bad for it.
Pick any profession. You ask the wrong questions as a podcaster, you could ruin somebody, or you could elevate them to the highest extent. So podcasters are very important people, very powerful people.
How often do we say that, if you’re trying to get some corporate work, maybe your health training, probably the most important person is the gatekeeper, the receptionist at the front desk. If you can’t convince her to let you talk to the boss, then the receptionist is the most powerful person in the whole business. Or is it the CEO?
It’s all about, in that moment, what is important.
I could go into a big organisation, educate people on health and mindset, increase profits, make them happier, make them more confident, make them more driven. And because the receptionist didn’t like the look of me, she says, “No, you’re not talking to Steve. He’s too busy. I’m looking at his book here. He doesn’t have anything in his calendar until December.”
You just lose that opportunity, and they have now lost money because she thought, “Hypnosis.”
Darren Jamieson:
I need hypnosis for that. I’ve got something stuck in my throat there.
It’s like a GP’s receptionist, the ones that control all the power and stop people getting appointments. It seems to be their goal in life to prevent it.
Turan Mirza:
Again, I don’t want to take sides in case I get a cough. I don’t want to say anything bad about that.
But everybody has a power to wield, and in the right situations can do the wrong thing, no more than a sales guy that convinces you to buy something more than you have the credit for.
Darren Jamieson:
Okay, let’s look at the good stuff then. Rather than talk about sales, let’s look at the good stuff that hypnosis can do.
When we spoke about a month ago, you told me about a particular client that you helped who had a parachuting incident.
Turan Mirza:
Indeed. The lovely Joan McConnell. Just one of my many clients in similar situations. I won’t say similar, but she was a parachutist.
We’re going back now 30-plus years, 1995, believe it or not. She had done about 63 successful parachute jumps. She was flying at 6,500 feet. That’s pretty high. She jumped out of the airplane and the parachute did open, but then the auxiliary one, the backup one, deployed as well. The two tangled together and she hit the ground at over 100 miles per hour.
For 25 years, she had post-traumatic stress. She couldn’t talk about what happened. She couldn’t write about what happened. And she couldn’t go back to the site where she fell, which is an airfield in Northern Ireland, Bishopscourt, which is now a racing track for go-karts and stuff.
She came to me and I worked with her. I worked with her for the first session on the Wednesday, and two days later she went back down to Bishopscourt Racing Track for the first time in 25 years.
She took her 17-year-old daughter, who wasn’t born at the time, if you do the maths. Her daughter heard stories she hadn’t heard before about her mum.
That’s pretty powerful. That’s 25 years of trauma.
What’s nice is that was in 2020. She came to me 25 years after 1995, and in 2022 she launched a book. So she’s now written it down.
I’ll give myself a plug and say I’ve got a YouTube channel, and her video testimonial, because she contacted me after that event and she said, “Look, I want to give you a testimonial.”
Me being the usual, I said, “Do you want to give me a Google review? Here’s the little link. Check out the Google review and leave me a review.”
She said, “No, I want to give you a video testimonial.”
So we arranged to go back down to the site. The video is actually down there, and you can see her standing.
I had this, dare I say, morbid idea of getting a drone and going up 6,500 feet and dropping it, so we get a bit of footage for this video of the fall. I thought, “No, I can’t even mention that.” But then she mentioned it, so I thought, “All right, that would be a good idea.”
My son had just recently bought a drone and I’d never really used it before. So I got down on site, and that’s the point for anybody watching or listening that knows about drones for aviation restrictions, there’s a 400-foot limit. So you can’t actually go up 6,500 feet.
Darren Jamieson:
I was going to say.
Turan Mirza:
So I went up and said, “Oh, can’t go up any higher.” Then I recorded some footage. You can see some slow speed. I didn’t want to accelerate too fast because I wasn’t used to using the drone.
But even 400 feet, you see a wide perspective getting closer. I don’t know if I could have cut that video if it was 6,500 feet.
What’s strange is, and again, we’re talking 25 years from the fall, but the footage is of this little copse of trees. Obviously, it was just a grassy knoll back then, but now there’s a little bitty forest growing there. But it shows you, that’s exactly where she fell.
The scary bit, shall we say, is there’s this tarmac runway to one side, and then this concrete flat area to the other, and this little grassy knoll. If she had landed anywhere else, I don’t think it would have been the same story.
Darren Jamieson:
It’s amazing she survived at all.
Turan Mirza:
That’s it. Like I say, buy the book, My Piece of Sky. There’s a little plug there for allowing me to tell that story again. My Piece of Sky was her book.
I love that title. I was at the book launch and she explained, she’s lying there looking up, and she thought to herself, she couldn’t move her head to the left or the right. She was just really paralysed at the time, for those moments. She didn’t remain paralysed. She was walking and moving about again. It took her about a year to get up and on her feet.
But at that moment, she just looked up in the sky and said, “That’s my piece of sky.” Hence the name of the book, which I thought was beautiful.
Darren Jamieson:
That is a nice name for the book.
You told me the other month, when you went back to the site to film the video testimonial, that someone came over who witnessed it.
Turan Mirza:
I can’t remember what I was telling you the last time, but yes.
When we went down, she obviously rang the site owners and said, “Look, somebody’s coming down to film. Is there any objection to filming down there?”
He said, “No.” He said, “In fact, when you came down with your daughter the other day, I was talking to someone else and they said they witnessed the fall.”
That was an interesting experience in itself.
So when we went down, he had brought that gentleman along. He was a farmer. Again, I love the subtleties of this.
When she was jumping out of an airplane, she had done these 63 successful parachute jumps and you’re 6,000 feet up in the sky, you think nobody’s watching. Nobody can see me. I’m in a world of my own up there in the sky.
But he was a farmer and he said, “I used to watch you guys all the time. You’d see this little dot of an airplane going up, these little pin dots of people jumping out, and the next thing, parachutes would open. You’d see them settling down onto the ground over a period of time. Isn’t that fascinating? I used to watch that.”
He said, “So the day of your accident, I noticed one dot was not emanating. This parachute was not opening correctly, and I could see there was a problem.”
He turned around and said, “I heard you scream.”
Now, she had explained to me beforehand, so when she was explaining to him, I’d heard the story. Not in session, because again, we don’t talk about events in the session. We just talk about how you think about the events.
But she had explained to me, and she explained to the farmer, when she was falling and she knew, “There’s nobody going to come to my rescue now. There’s no way out. I’m falling and I don’t have a parachute, for all intents and purposes, any longer.”
So she went into this almost blissful state.
But the diving instructor, who she later married, saw her falling. He knew the only way to get to her was by basically collapsing his parachute completely so he would fall as fast to her. Even still, at that point, she’d be ahead of him. Probably he wouldn’t. So there was nothing he could do either.
So he screamed. Her husband was in the room with us and he said, “Yep, it was me.”
So, it wasn’t her that screamed. It was actually him that went, “Wow.”
When you think about it, if a tiger’s coming towards you, you scream because you’re hoping someone will hear you scream and pull out a rifle and shoot the tiger before the tiger gets to you. There’s a reason why. Again, I don’t want to go into too much psychology because I’m talking slightly off the top of my head here, but the theory would be you scream because you’re trying to draw attention to, “I’m in danger.”
But for her, she went, “This is time to say goodbye,” and make peace with God and all the rest of it. She almost went to a different place than that. What’s the use in screaming? Nobody can come to me.
Darren Jamieson:
She must be incredibly strong to have recovered.
Turan Mirza:
She’s a wonderful lady. She now does, from time to time, talks on her experiences thanks to that, which she couldn’t have for 25 years.
That’s what probably everybody says, “Wow, she fell 6,500 feet and survived.” To many, that’s the most shocking fact.
To me, the bigger fact is that she married someone who witnessed it. The two of them were there on that day, and they never really talked about it for 25 years.
It was just a known thing. This is going to trigger her in the wrong direction. We’re not going to speak about it. We’re not going to talk about it.
And yet hypnosis changed the way she thought.
Darren Jamieson:
Did you have to work with her husband, the instructor, at all? Because this must have been harrowing for him to have witnessed.
Turan Mirza:
No. But if you watch the video, he’s on the video at the end, and he’s amazing.
I find this a lot with everyone. If I’m working with, another beautiful testimonial, moving slightly away to another example, I was working with a nine-year-old child, and just the parents talking about the change to their life thanks to the child changing.
When I work with one person, everyone around them feels the benefit, because we all interact with each other and we all impact each other.
If you are married, or whatever, if you’re pissed off, your wife, your husband, your kids, whoever is listening, they’re all impacted. If you have a bad day at the office and you come home to the wife and the kids, they’re impacted.
So when you change your stress levels and you change your ability to cope with the situations that you cope with, and you come home and you’re happier, the kids, the wives, the husbands, they feel it as well.
This is never just one person gaining the benefit.
Darren Jamieson:
That leads onto something I was going to ask about, actually, because there’s going to be a lot of people listening to this that think, “I’m smoking, I’d like to stop,” or “I bite my nails, I’d like to stop,” or “I’ve got a fear of spiders,” whatever it is.
But they’ll be worried that, how long is it going to take? Is it going to be embarrassing? Am I going to be able to be hypnotised? How much is it going to cost? Is it really going to work?
But what you’re saying is, the impact isn’t just on them. It’s on the people around them as well. They kind of owe it to their friends and family to take action on it.
Turan Mirza:
Again, I’m almost going to say, you were on such a good streak there, but you’ve got to do it for yourself.
This is a hard thing for me to ask people sometimes.
I’ll get a call from maybe a daughter saying, “Can you help my mother stop smoking?”
I’m thinking of one client in particular. She’s 70 years of age. She’s smoked all her life, but she’s got cancer and they won’t operate until she stops smoking.
“Can you help her stop?”
I have the uncomfortable responsibility of saying, “Well, does she want to stop?”
Which sounds a cruel thing to say, but she still has a choice in that moment of continuing to smoke because she enjoys it and not getting the operation.
It comes back again to what I said. Other scenarios, people ring up, “Can you help my husband stop smoking? I hate it. He comes in from work and his clothes are smelly, the car is smelly. I hate it. Can you help him stop smoking?”
“Does he want to stop?”
“No, he loves it, but I want him to stop.”
I can’t make him stop because he doesn’t want it. He doesn’t want that change, so it’s not going to happen.
Not because he’s positively resisting. If I go to hypnotise you and you put your fingers in your ears and go, “La, la, la,” that’s positively forcing yourself not to listen, not to get involved. It’s about communication. If you can’t hear me, nothing’s going to happen. If you don’t follow my instructions and accept the suggestions, nothing’s going to happen.
That’s positively stopping it.
But he just enjoys the cigarettes. Plenty of people do. I’m not a Bible thumper for any issue, for stop smoking or whatever. But if you don’t want to stop, hypnosis, I often describe, is like conflict management.
If you’re getting to the stage where, “I want to stop smoking. I’m feeling the wheeze in my chest. I’m feeling the pain in the wallet. I know I should stop. But I woke up this morning thinking last night was my last cigarette, and I woke up this morning and I looked down, and there’s a lit cigarette in my hand.”
That’s not the first time I’ve heard a similar type of story.
Consciously, they’ve made a decision. But unconsciously, the brain’s going, “But you always get out of bed and have a cigarette with a coffee in the morning over the kitchen table,” or whatever. “You always have a cigarette after dinner.”
So consciously, “I’m not going to do it. I’m not going to do it.” And you go, “Oh.” They’re looking down going, “Ah.” When it’s actually them that reached into their jacket pocket, purse, handbag, whatever. They’ve pulled out a cigarette, or spent three minutes rolling it, then lighting it and taking a draw.
“I wasn’t going to do that today.”
They just did it without realising because that four or five minutes of actions, or whatever it takes to do that, was done without thought. What we would call unconscious behaviours or actions.
Most people that bite their nails, you mentioned nail biting earlier, most people biting their nails will have the hand coming away from their mouth and go, “Ah, I’ve done it again.”
Darren Jamieson:
Yeah.
Turan Mirza:
It’s not like, as the hand approaches their mouth, they’re going, “Oh, I’m going to do it. I’m going to do it. Stop doing it. Stop doing it.” They do it without thinking about it, and then as they pull their hand away, they go, “Ah, done it again.”
Darren Jamieson:
The most common one I can think of, and I do this all the time, is when you’re driving. You forget that you’re driving, you forget where you are, and suddenly you’re 10 miles further down the motorway and you’ve no idea how you got there.
Turan Mirza:
That’s called highway hypnosis.
Darren Jamieson:
Highway hypnosis.
Turan Mirza:
That’s it.
Everybody has their own nuances describing it. You get out of the car, you’ll be lifting the bags out, the Tesco, Asda bags, whatever, and you’ll go, “I don’t even remember driving home there. Did I cross the…”
Another variation of that would be you were driving along and a child or a dog steps off the pavement and you go, “Oh, where did that come from?”
So you saw it, hopefully, and you caught it on time, but you were so entranced on that meeting with the boss, or what you’re going to watch on the TV tonight, the next episode of Cheers, or Friends, whatever.
Darren Jamieson:
Cheers?
Turan Mirza:
I know. I caught myself on there. I meant to say Friends, but anyway, even Friends.
Whatever. Or Love Island, if we’re trying to hit the safe ground there. You’re so busy thinking about, “Oh, is he going to kiss her? Is she going to kiss him?” Whatever is happening on that, that you’re in another place.
But you’re not mounting the pavement every two seconds. Part of your brain is driving that car. It is indicating, it is seeing the red light, it is slowing down. But you don’t need to worry about the dog walking along the pavement.
But the dog veers towards you and you go, “Oh, where did that come from?” Because the unconscious mind says, “Here, I need a bit of conscious support here. This is not habitual.”
The unconscious mind is really good at habits.
That highway hypnosis, you’ll hardly have that if you’re driving somewhere you’ve never driven before, because you’re totally in conscious mind. Maybe glancing safely to the satnav or Google Maps in a hands-free proper thing, and following the signs and looking for the street names and all the rest of it.
But it’s in those regular routes that you go back and forth to, the regular trip to the local shop, or the Tesco, or Morrisons, or whatever. Even that, which has multiple turns and multiple traffic lights and multiple zebra crossings, becomes habitual.
You do it without thinking about it, and the brain goes, “Well, I can think about Love Island or what I’m going to have for dinner when I get home, or what I’m going to buy at Asda when I get there, because it’s always in the fifth aisle, the pizzas or whatever.”
You can open up more space to think about that while you put it on autopilot, as the airplanes would do.
Darren Jamieson:
It’s like something that I’ve talked about a lot, and you’re probably familiar with this as well. Trainers speak about it, and it’s the quadrant of competence.
The first one is unconscious incompetence. You don’t know that you’re not. So, before you start driving, you don’t know that driving is difficult.
Then you get to conscious incompetence. You realise that it is difficult and you’re learning to do it, before you then get to conscious competence. So you know how to drive, but you’ve got to concentrate.
Before finally, you get to what you’ve just described, which is unconscious competence, and you’re driving without even thinking about it.
Is it dangerous, though?
Turan Mirza:
It’s just part of the human brain. It’s just how we operate.
If you had to think about tying your shoelaces every time you had to tie your shoelaces, if you had to, you just sipped, hopefully nothing alcoholic, but you just sipped a glass of water there, or coffee.
Darren Jamieson:
Coffee.
Turan Mirza:
Coffee. You had to move your shoulder joint, you had to move your elbow joint, you had to move your wrist just to sip that coffee. If you had to think about that, you would be a blubbering mass of trying to think.
Darren Jamieson:
I get that when I log into my computer in the morning. I put the password in without thinking.
Turan Mirza:
That’s it.
Darren Jamieson:
If I hit the wrong key, as sometimes happens, I then have to go back and think about my password. I can’t think what it is exactly. I walk away, go make a coffee, come back, and then do it without thinking, because if I try and think of it, I don’t know it.
Turan Mirza:
That’s it.
Darren Jamieson:
I couldn’t tell you what, not that I would tell you, but I couldn’t tell you what it is right now. It’s total muscle memory.
Turan Mirza:
Exactly. That itself is a lovely phrase to a hypnotist because muscles don’t have memory, but it’s the unconscious brain that stores all that.
When tennis players are continuously building up, inadvertently, that muscle memory, what they’re building up is the unconscious mind’s ability to have that elbow, that wrist, that shoulder in that ideal position to angle that ball, to spin that ball, whatever.
So that muscle memory is an unconscious.
Darren Jamieson:
I suppose it’s the difference between somebody who’s good at something and somebody who’s good at teaching others something, because if you’ve got the unconscious ability, the muscle memory to do something, that doesn’t mean you’re able to explain to someone else how to do it.
Turan Mirza:
Exactly.
Darren Jamieson:
Because you don’t know how you do it.
Turan Mirza:
That’s it. We all have experiences of that.
Darren Jamieson:
Which is why the best football players don’t necessarily make very good managers.
Turan Mirza:
That applies in business as well. How many times have you got a great software engineer, and he becomes a software manager, and he can’t manage people because there are two different sets of skills? One’s people management and the other’s writing software.
Darren Jamieson:
Yeah. Well, there is a belief in the public sector, and even in the private sector as well, that you get promoted to one level above your ability.
Turan Mirza:
That’s it. The reason it’s that one level is because once you get that one level, your performance has now dropped, so you don’t get promoted again.
Darren Jamieson:
Yeah. So everybody is crap at what they do because we’ve all reached the maximum of our potential, or above the maximum. We should all go down a level and then everything will work a lot better.
Turan Mirza:
I wouldn’t go that far, because some people go, “Right, here’s a promotion.” “No. Pay me more to be an engineer, but I’m not going to be a people manager, because I’m good at engineering,” or whatever their skill base is.
If somebody turns down a promotion, or they might wangle the same amount of money but stay in the same position, I would pay them that because they’re the smart ones. They realise where the competency lies.
Darren Jamieson:
They know what they’re good at.
Turan Mirza:
That’s it.
Darren Jamieson:
Okay. One question I definitely wanted to ask you. You’ve helped a lot of people with a lot of different problems.
Turan Mirza:
Yeah.
Darren Jamieson:
What are the most common things you’ve helped people with? We’ve talked about smoking, obviously, and nail biting. What are the most common things you’ve helped people with, and what are some of the more unusual ones?
Turan Mirza:
I hate to class anybody as crazy, silly or unusual. Everything is real in their mind.
Somebody comes in with a fear of spiders, it is real. People will come in saying, “I know this is silly, but…” But I know it’s not silly. Not to them.
All their friends are saying, fear of driving, fear of passing your driving test, or anxiety about passing the driving exam, people say, “Don’t be silly. It’s just a car. It’s just the road. Everybody’s doing it. You’re just being silly.”
But they’re not being silly because that anxiety, that feeling that, “My heart’s going to burst if I make a mistake here in front of an examiner,” that is so real to them.
So nothing’s unusual or silly.
We talked about, it’s not every day I’ve had a parachutist come into me that survived a fall.
I worked with somebody for fear of tall grass. This is a lady who liked to hike, but if she came to a certain field that had tall grass, she would just circumvent the field when it would be quicker just to diagonally cut across the field. That just irritated her.
Fear of wasps, I don’t even know if that goes into the extremes. Spiders is probably the most common thing. There are lots of spiders about.
The key thing is, people always say to me, “Does that mean I won’t know what a spider looks like?” or “Does that mean I won’t know what a wasp looks like?”
It’s getting rid of the fear aspect of it. You won’t go over and kiss the spider. You definitely won’t go over and kiss the wasp, or bees or whatever. You will get stung if they think you’re going to attack them.
You’ll just go, “Oh, there’s a spider. I think I’ll just leave the room.” So you might still leave the room, or you might ask Dad to go pick that up. It doesn’t mean you become the one that lifts the spider and puts it out the door or whatever. It just means that you don’t have that.
Some of the expressions and some of the responses people have had for fear of spiders or fear of flying. I’ve had people, I think I might have mentioned this before to you, who can’t, sitting in their living room, watch an airplane on the television. Their fear of flying is that bad.
It’s not like they’ve just booked a holiday and they’re panicking about the trip in two months’ time. It’s not like they’re standing in the departure lounge and looking at the airplane. It’s not like they’ve just walked up the stairs and they’re on the plane and now they’re panicking that they’re going to get locked into this metal container that’s going to fly up in the sky.
They’re sitting in their living room with no plans to travel anywhere, but they have a feeling that rushes up in them when they see an airplane on the screen, and they leave the room.
Does this answer the question?
Darren Jamieson:
I think it does. I think it does. The fear of tall grass is presumably what might be in the tall grass was the problem.
Turan Mirza:
Again, this is the beauty of it. People come to me and say, “I have a fear of X, Y or Z.”
I’ve even got some demos on the YouTube channel. A lot of the YouTube channel, because I learned just doing street hypnosis, is some fun street hypnosis stuff. There is a playlist called change work.
I don’t like the word therapy. I like the words hypnotic change work because therapy has a negative connotation. If you Google the word therapy, it says to overcome a disorder. I don’t think people have a disorder. I don’t think they’re broken. They just have a way of thinking and we need to change that way of thinking.
I’ve lost my train of thought.
There are several videos up there of content free, what I call content free. So somebody’s come up to me and said, “Right, I have a problem. I have a feeling about something and I want to change that feeling.”
I can get them to change the way they feel about it, and I have no idea whether it’s a fear of clowns, whether it’s a fear of tall grass, whether it’s a fear of spiders, because all I’m doing is working with the feeling and getting them to change the way they feel.
I’ve had clients come in where they’ve said, “Look, I don’t really want to talk about this. Something happened in the past and I want to change the way I feel about it. Can you help me without me telling you what it was?”
I can.
Because hypnosis is all about, they know what’s happened consciously. Like the smoker consciously knows they’re smoking, and unconsciously it’s saying, “Well, you’re a smoker, so I’ll keep you smoking.” But they consciously want to stop. So there’s a conscious mind, and the unconscious mind is keeping them in the old pattern.
The conscious mind says, “I want to get over that incident. I was mugged. They took my wallet. I want to forget that ever happened, but every morning I wake up, and every time I see that wallet, I just…”
I don’t need to know that they were mugged two or three years ago. I just need to know they have a feeling about a memory, and I can help them change that feeling because it’s them fixing it and they know what happened.
I’ve had people come to me who said, “I’ve been in therapy for two years,” and one session with me has impacted them more than the two years of therapy.
Now, I’ll give credit where credit may be due. Maybe the two years of therapy helped them to get to the point where my one session did the work.
Darren Jamieson:
So they loosened the bottle top and you just opened it.
Turan Mirza:
Well, I’m not giving too much credit, but it could be the case.
Ultimately, I’ll often say, and give credit where I can, a lovely Scottish gentleman, Bob Burns, is a hypnotherapist, and he has this lovely phrase saying, “You don’t have a conscious problem.”
We go back to something like spiders. Consciously, you know that even though you’ve only got two legs and it’s got eight, you could run away from it. They know that.
There are very few people who come to me with fear of spiders who don’t realise they’re bigger than the spider.
I’m not advocating any cruelty to animals, but consciously they know they could stand on it and kill it if they wanted to before it could ever do any harm to them. We’re not in Brazil where they’re poisonous. We’re not in Australia where they’re dangerous. We’re in the UK.
So even if it did touch them, it would tickle more than anything. They know all these things consciously. Consciously, that’s not the problem.
But they get this feeling from somewhere inside them, whether it’s deep in their belly, just in the back of their head, wherever it is. It could be in their big toe. I don’t know. Wherever they’re getting this feeling, it’s just, “I don’t want to be around this. Get me out of here. This is a danger. I’ve learned this.”
Coming back to what we were talking about earlier, it’s a learned behaviour. So changing that learning can change the way they think.
Darren Jamieson:
That’s a beautiful phrase. Changing that learning can change the way they think. That’s a great way to end it there.
Turan, if somebody’s listening to this thinking, “I love this. I want to contact you. I need help. Can you cure me of whatever issue I’ve got?” What’s the best way for them to speak to you?
Turan Mirza:
Well, I’ll jump in there with, I don’t cure anything. They cure themselves. They fix themselves.
Darren Jamieson:
You show them.
Turan Mirza:
I don’t deal out the cures.
But www.feelinggood.today
, that’s my website with the phone numbers. I’m on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, X, nearly said Twitter there, showing my age again, and more.
Just search for Feelgood Hypnosis, that’s the company name, and my Google ranking is pretty good. You’ll see the website and all the other places where you can find me, get in touch with me.
I love talking about this stuff, as I’m sure you’ve twigged by now. So if anybody wants to just ask a question about the possibility of help with something, I’d be glad to help them change their own lives.
Darren Jamieson:
Fantastic. I will put the links to the website, social media and the contact details below the podcast.
So if you’re watching on YouTube, it’s in the description. If you’re listening on iTunes, Spotify, Amazon or something else, it’s in the show notes below the podcast. Scroll down and you can reach out to Turan that way.
Turan, thank you very much for being on the podcast. It’s been absolutely fascinating.
More about Turan:
Turan Mirza is a hypnotist and hypnotic change work practitioner at Feelgood Hypnosis. He helps people change unwanted thoughts, feelings and behaviours, including fears, phobias, smoking, nail biting, anxiety and confidence issues. With experience dating back to 2010, Turan uses hypnosis to help clients understand and change learned responses, with a focus on practical, positive change rather than labels or disorders.
You can connect with Turan here:
Website: https://www.feel-good.today/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/feelgoodhypnosis
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/turan-mirza/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FeelGoodHypnosis
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/feelgoodhypnosis/
About your host:
Darren has worked within digital marketing since the last century, and was the first in-house web designer for video games retailer GAME in the UK, known as Electronics Boutique in the States. After co-founding his own agency, Engage Web, in 2009, Darren has worked with clients around the world, including Australia, Canada and the USA.
iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/engaging-marketeer/id1612454837
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/darrenjamieson/
Engaging Marketeer: https://engagingmarketeer.com
Engage Web: https://www.engageweb.co.uk
