President's Message
Once again the “World’s largest and friendliest hypnotism convention” was a great time of camaraderie and learning as NGH members came from around the world to Marlborough, Massachusetts. As always the friendly staff of the Royal Plaza gave us First Class service. Why? I really think it’s because they recognize that Guild members are First Class professionals: when that happens you just naturally attract goods things to your life that you deserve.
Now, maybe as you are reading this column you could be having a bad day, a difficult client session, some personal problems, and you say to yourself, “What the heck is Dr. D talking about? Is everything always positive in his life? Is he always feeling ‘terrific’ as he says when people ask him how he is?-can I believe that?”
Believe it-even before I understood why, I have always been positive about my life. Maybe I was born with a positive attitude, or learned it from my parents, but I never suddenly decided that I was a positive thinker. I have to admit that, like most people, I’ve also had ups and downs, happiness and grief along the way, but nobody ever said life was supposed to always be a bed of roses.
I know there it’s been said that the best person to guide you away from failure is one who has failed and then bounced back, but I also believe the experience of almost failing, almost going bankrupt, even almost being divorced works too. If you talk to the longtime, successful consulting hypnotists you will find most of them have weathered the storm of one or more of the previous situations.
In 1955, with two years of college and three in the USCG, a friend told me about Norman Vincent Peale’s Power of Positive Thinking. I laughed to myself at the idea of positive thinking to attract what you want in life, never realizing that I was already doing it naturally. Later, enrolled in chiropractic college, I learned about “concepting” which is now popularly known as “manifesting,” and which, with practice, can be consciously developed to help both you and your clients.
I earned my doctorate in ’59, but on returning to New Hampshire I found that establishing a professional practice in a town of only 800 residents could be very difficult—particularly when you are known as both a chiropractor and a hypnotist. Still, I was concepting that patients would beat a path to my door from two large cities, only nine miles in either direction. Yet, I barely took in enough to support my growing family.
Then I took a financial leap and scraped together enough money to attend a weekend seminar in Fort Worth, Texas, where Dr. Jim Parker "put it all together" for chiropractors. It was an awakening! I realized that I already knew all the principles ... I just wasn’t putting them to work . . . or, I wasn’t putting them to work correctly and completely. Suddenly I had a new attitude (what I now call excited enthusiasm) about my practice and my life. When my wife was getting the kids ready for school the next day they wanted to know what happened to their dad, because late the night before when I came home I was “different.” Excited Enthusiasm had entered my life.
I made a drastic change my first day back when I had to tell my best friend, colleague and mentor that I couldn’t afford him any more. He was a very negative influence in my professional life although neither of us realized it. When I first opened Russ came by to welcome me . . . he explained that all the professional offices didn’t open until 2 pm, and that I needed to close on Wednesdays like the MDs (all at the golf course on Wednesday afternoons) . . . and that business was really dead in the summer months. Oh, and that I had certainly made a mistake opening my practice in such a small town.
Of course, I took all his advice because he had been in practice for years and should know all about what to do. I started driving into the city to have coffee with him every morning never realizing that his other acquaintances were also very negative people.
Now, when I saw him the day after returning from Texas I leveled with him. I told him he was as close to me as one of my brothers, but he was draining my battery with his negativity and I couldn’t afford it. I hoped that we could still be friends, but I couldn’t be hanging around with him as I had been doing. He surprised me when he said, “Yep, I’m probably the most negative person you’ll ever meet, but I understand what you’re saying.” We did remain friends, but it was outside my professional life.
Twenty years later I had sold my clinic building and built a smaller home/office. Doing some office paper work I heard somebody in the waiting room although nobody was scheduled. As I opened the door I didn’t recognize the man sitting there until he said, “Hi Dwight, it’s me, Russ.”
We had lost touch through the years, but we sat and talked. He had closed his practice since he couldn’t make a go of it, and he went to work for the state unemployment department counseling people who were out of work! His wife had died and he was alone. I tried to make him feel better, but he said, “Look at you . . . you opened in the right location, and got lucky . . . I saw the two cadillacs in the driveway. Boy, you really got lucky!”
Did I really get “lucky”? Maybe, but I don’t think I was any luckier than anyone else, and I can tell you now, after a number of successful careers in different fields, that it all works—
if you work it.
Back to my story ... when I first got my state license, I was the only “doctor” of any kind in town, and at times acted not only as chiropractor, psychologist, hypnotist, counselor, veterinarian, and even triage center when a patient couldn’t decide whether they needed to go to the hospital in the city. But, I also gave back to the town through the years, utilizing talents and skills that I had and doing things that I enjoyed that would benefit my fellow citizens.
At first there was a lot of disbelief and apprehension from potential patients about both chiropractic and hypnotism. This was fifty years ago when both practices were not readily accepted. However, over the years, instead of burning me at the stake, though, they named me “Citizen of the Year”. . . twice.
We have a terrific tool-hypnosis-to use for our clients, our families and ourselves. Also, on a personal basis, using hypnosis with motivation principles is a powerful way of ramping up our personal success journey. We all need to personally apply positive principles to our lives, and to help elevate our profession as the separate and distinct profession we have established.
Since 1986 we’ve constantly pushed “The Big Idea—a separate and distinct profession.” Nineteen years later, at the 2005 Solid Gold in Las Vegas, I announced that we had, in fact, achieved that goal. We’ve accomplished a lot since the founding of the Guild over half a century ago. Now, with the number of new consulting hypnotists being trained our future looks promising as that separate and distinct profession.
Recently at the convention I asked Elsom Eldridge to google “certified consulting hypnotist,” a title which we first introduced three years ago at the August 2006 convention. I found that it appeared 1,750,000 times on the Internet. Our title has received wide usage and popularity, and although not every practitioner uses it, it is becoming solidly established for our practitioners as another integral part of the professional vocabulary we’ve established to set us apart from other professions.
On a professional level, since we started in 1950/51, NGH has grown to be the largest of all the professional hypnotism member organizations. We’ve established a “separate and distinct profession” through a lot of hard work and the power of concepting, but we can’t just stop here. There is still more to come—a lot more!
Now we have members in sixty-five countries around the world, we are appointing Regional Ambassadors to oversee formation and expansion of local NGH Chapters, act as a contact persons for NGH members in their region/country, and to be contact persons for the media. A lot of wonderful members have given a lot of themselves in working for the greater good of our profession. It would be difficult to make a list for fear of missing a name, but they are all appreciated nevertheless.
Dr. Dwight F. Damon, President
National Guild of Hypnotists, Inc.
National Federation of Hypnotists, Local 104 OPEIU-ALF/CIO