WHAT DID YOU DO WHEN THE WORLD WAS ON LOCK DOWN?

2020 will go down in history as one of the strangest years on a great many accounts. I began 2020 in January with David Murphy and Omar Salom at the NLP Leadership Summit and as we talked— we all anticipated a busy and exciting year. In February I was in Egypt on the first and, as it turned out, only training that I did in the year. When we returned at the end of February, the lock-down began. For months Geraldine and I were essentially in house-arrest and couldn’t go anywhere. That’s also when people began calling or emailing and cancelling one training after the other, one conference after another. Recently someone wrote and asked, “What did you do when the world was on lock down?”

At first, I didn’t mind being unemployed. I was working on Hypnotic Thinking and wanted to complete that and get it to the printer. I did that in March. While working on that and on a new Training Manual for it, I came upon the idea of writing hypnotic inductions. I wrote several inductions in the book, and then thought, I could write inductions for all of the APG patterns, and more. So I began working on that book. Now it was April and nothing was happening in terms of opening up. I was still exercising in the garage with an inadequate assortment of weights since the gym was still closed. And we were doing “coffee” on the dining table, since Starbucks, and every other coffee shop, was closed. So I did and that produced the book, Hypnotic Conversations.

Now what? June was here ... at least we could get out a little bit. We had to wear masks to the gym and inhale lots of carbon-dioxide (how healthy was that?!). So somewhere along the way as I was re-reading nearly everything that Milton Erickson ever wrote, the idea struck me to write a humorous hypnotic conversation— to induce people into a state of laughter and fun. I certainly needed that. As a got a taste of that, I thought, “I could do with more of this.”

So with that, I began reading in the field of humor and comedy. I also watched a whole range of comedians on Youtube and began to model the structure of humor. We watched nearly all of the masters of comedy which passed many, many hours. That lasted through June and July during which I created Filipino jokes custom-made just for Geraldine. She kept asking, “What’s so funny about that? and so from that, lo and behold, came the book Humorous Thinking to answer her question.

What I discovered about humor is that it is much more a form of thinking than it is a state of emotion. That’s because it is driven by incongruity, ambiguity, exaggerated representations, etc. So it deals with the very same mechanisms that framing and reframing deal with— as well as creativity and innovation. Given all of those inter-connections, I put together a training manual that I titled, Unleashing Your Humor Potentials.

In August one of the hypnotic inductions that I put in Hypnotic Conversations was about resilience. As I worked on that, and as several trainers were training the Resilience manual, I thought, “What the heck, I have nothing else to do, might as well write a book on resilience.” I had previously entertained that thought when I wrote Thinking as a Modeler in 2018. When that indigestion passed, I moved on. Now while I had written chapters about resilience, referred to it often, I never wrote the book. So reviewing what I already had written and thinking through a better way to present it, I first created a new Training Manual, then I wrote the book, Resilience: Being the Phoenix.

Still in house-arrest in mid-September and having no trainings on the horizon, being a bit indecisive, I finally decided that I would write on deciding. That followed up naturally from Executive Thinking since thinking–deciding are so intimately linked together. That lead to reviewing books on decision-making and reading many new ones on the subject. It was also picked up where Executive Thinking ended. I didn’t even have a chapter on decision-making in that book. So Executive Decisions arose as a companion book to focus on the major problem that nearly all humans have— making intelligent decisions.

Unlike the traveling and training schedule, the daily schedule throughout 2020 has been to start the day with three hours of reading and then three hours of writing. To keep healthy, we do an hour of exercise, except when we go hike in the mountains. When hiking we would go from 1½ to 2, and on occasion 4 hours. So in answer to the question, what did I do while things were in locked down, I wrote five books— mostly just to keep busy and productive. Just to employ myself during my unemployment.

It is now the end of November and I have finished Executive Decisions, so guess it is time for another book. Let me see, what’s the next problem that I have that I’ll research? Say, what did you do during the lock down? How did you employ yourself?

The list of 2020 books Hypnotic Thinking: For Unleashing Potentials (Part I) Hypnotic Conversations For Unleashing Potentials (Part II) Humorous Thinking: The Essence of Creativity, Reframing and Well-Being Resilience: Being the Phoenix Executive Decisions: Smart Deciding And the three serial books written week by week Neurons, Framers, and Morpheus.