This is the case of a 67 year old male retiree that came in to eliminate his fear of public speaking. During the intake we discussed his career and discovered that he did quite well in all aspects with the single exception of having to address his employees. He lived with a fear of public speaking throughout his entire life. He stated that he was coming in now, to fix this, since the only part of his life where he had regrets was in his inability to speak in public. He wanted to “fix this to feel better about myself”. This comment in addition to others made it very obvious that he was using toward/internal thinking. “Feel better = toward”, “about myself”= internal.

With this as the motivation we used several hypnotic and NLP techniques to eliminate his fear of public speaking. With hypnosis we determined the initial sensitizing event, which had happed in grade school. We did the change history technique on that event and subsequent events always leaving him “feeling better about himself. We then anchored this feeling to making a fist with his left hand (something that can be easily done with speaking). We also did some reframing of fear as excitement for the opportunity to express opinions to a group of people. We then future paced so that we were sure his good feelings about himself would appear.

This left real life testing. Since he is a retiree he was not sure where he would get the opportunity to speak. I suggested he attend some town meetings, not with the intention to speak but to observe and if something came up in which he wanted to comment on, he was to do that.

During a follow-up call about a month later he stated that he has attended one to two town meetings each week and spoke easily at two of them. He was actually becoming very interested in politics at the local level and felt that he no longer has an issue with public speaking.

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