Milton Erickson - The Man Who Could Transform You In One Sentence

Milton Erickson is possibly the most extraordinary therapist who ever lived, and one of the most quietly influential minds of the 20th century. He spent most of his life in a wheelchair. He was colorblind, tone deaf, dyslexic, and in constant physical pain. He is also the man modern coaching, modern self-help, modern sales training, and every future self meditation you have ever done all descend from. When two young Californians drove out to his converted garage in Phoenix in the 1970s and wrote down what he was doing, the system they published became Neuro Linguistic Programming, and it went on to shape most of what people now think of as personal development. I have been using his techniques in my meditations for years without ever fully telling you where they came from. Today I am going to tell you. ⠀ I take you through the whole life. The night in 1919 when a 17-year-old boy overheard three doctors tell his mother he would be dead by morning, and how he rebuilt his own paralyzed body over the following months by remembering how his muscles had felt when they worked. The 1000-mile canoe trip he took alone on the Mississippi with legs that had recently refused to hold him up. The state hospitals of the 1930s and what he did instead of arguing with a man who believed he was Jesus. The florist named Joe who was dying of face cancer, hated the word hypnosis, and received an hour of instruction about tomato plants — and the technique inside that conversation that Erickson used until the day he died. The African Violet Queen of Milwaukee. The 1954 experiment where subjects lived eight minutes of experience inside three seconds of clock time. The paper that same year that every future self meditation on earth descends from. And a message about the unconscious that has run through every recording I have ever made, delivered by a paralyzed old man in purple who taught until three days before he died. ⠀