Have I really got the guts to type: ‘Hello World’? Hmmm… seems I have. Sorry. Please don’t run away – especially if you happen to be a search engine crawling through my tiny, sub-atomic-sized speck of internet detritus looking for keywords and meta-tags.
I’ve dabbled with blogs before… and podcasts… and I’ve written the odd ‘article’ in my time, but I think I’m ready to do it properly this time. I’ve notched up a lot of experience in recent years and I’m keen to share it. If I’m able to help fellow musicians get the very best out of themselves, then my mission-statement is doing what I’d hope it would.
Rather like giving a whole house a MAMMOTH spring-clean, I have decided that all my musicians hypnosis self-help material should be in one place. Where better than the Musicians Hypnosis website?
It all started in 1999 with the production of my CD ‘Self Hypnosis for Musicians’. Actually, it started a few years before that. I’d had some hypnotherapy myself to iron out some mid-gig jitters – not massive stage-fright, but enough to know that if I was to continue as a professional player I needed to get this demon off my shoulder.
The therapy was transformative. That nagging voice in the back of my mind which always criticised me while I played was gone. How had this happened? All I had done was sit in a comfy chair and let the hypnotherapist talk to me. It seemed to be magic.
Magic was a topic close to my heart. I had been dabbling with cards and coins for many years thanks to my father who ‘knew a trick or two’. The frustration of not knowing how the magic was done instilled in me an unquenchable thirst for knowledge. The same thing was happening with the magic of hypnotherapy. I was hooked. I had to uncover it’s secrets.
After devouring many books and going on some courses and seminars I started making my own cassette tapes. After many months there was quite a shelf-full and eventually I started lending them out to my fellow musician friends. The feedback they gave me was extremely helpful and they tried to persuade me to turn these self-hypnosis tapes into a product.
I, of course, thought they were joking. I didn’t have the confidence to dare to believe that anyone would be interested in a self-help technique developed by, of all people, a DRUMMER! The idea of producing something to sell festered in the back of my mind for a while and, as is the nature of the brain, I started to see an awful lot of self-help cassettes and CDs in shops and catalogues.
I bought some tapes. I borrowed some CDs. I listened to quite a few, actually. I slowly found myself thinking that I actually could produce something if I put my mind to it. Some of the tapes I listened to were brilliant, yet some were buttock-clenchingly terrible and it was from these truly awful ones that I learnt the biggest lesson. I realised that if I produced something myself it may not be the best, but it most certainly wouldn’t be the worst!
I had been reading my way through the self-help litany and somewhere I had seen: “If not you, then who? If not now, then when?” Reading that was the final push I needed and in 1999 the ‘Self Hypnosis for Musicians CD’ hit the market. My journey had begun….
