David Carroll (David Carroll Coaching)

Say “hypnotherapy” and most people picture a stage act: someone clucking like a chicken with no memory of it afterwards. David Carroll’s work is the opposite of that, and it’s worth clearing up before you walk past his stand.

David runs David Carroll Coaching as a Master Hypnotherapist and an NLP practitioner and trainer. He’s accredited with the American Board of NLP and the Complementary Medical Association, among other professional bodies: the kind of letters after a name that mean someone has put their practice in front of an independent organisation rather than simply declaring themselves an expert. At an event where you’re deciding in a few seconds whether to trust someone with your attention, that’s worth knowing.

You stay in the driving seat

The thing to understand about clinical hypnotherapy is that you don’t lose control and you don’t go “under” in any dramatic sense. It’s closer to the absorbed, slightly dreamy state you’re in when a film pulls you all the way in, or when you drive a familiar route and arrive without quite remembering the drive. A hypnotherapist just helps you reach that state on purpose, so that changes you actually want, around habits or confidence, have somewhere to land. You could stand up and walk out at any moment. Most people simply don’t want to, because it’s genuinely restful.

Where the NLP comes in

Neuro-Linguistic Programming is the wide-awake half of David’s toolkit. Where hypnotherapy works with the relaxed mind, NLP works with the patterns in how you talk to yourself and picture things: the small mental habits that quietly run a mood or a reaction. He teaches these methods as well as using them, which tends to mean he can explain what he’s doing in plain terms rather than mystique.

Something to try before you come

Here’s a small NLP idea you can test this week, no trance required. Next time you catch yourself dreading something, such as a phone call or a difficult meeting, notice how you’re picturing it. Most people run it big, close-up and in colour, shot to look as daunting as possible. Try deliberately shrinking that mental image: push it back, drain the colour, make it small and dim, the size of a stamp. For a lot of people the feeling drops with the picture. It won’t solve the problem, but it shows you something useful: that the size of the dread is partly something you’re doing, and therefore something you can change. That’s the ground David’s work is built on.

David travels in from Doncaster.