Keeping the Brain in Mind: Practical Neuroscience for Coaches, Therapists, and Hypnosis Practitioners

Winner of the 2014 Pen and Quill Award IACT/ IMDHA

The latest revelations from neuroscience can transform the work you do, as a coach, hypnotist, or therapist, in ways that make measurable changes in the brain. This book will teach you how to integrate and utilize the research to explain and empower changes in habituated patterns of thought, feeling and behavior.

This book makes neuroscience practical. You will learn the neural mechanisms underlying common problems and how to transform them using techniques drawn from hypnosis, mindfulness, and Neuro-Linguistic Programming. Keeping the brain in mind will make your sessions more exciting and dynamic for both you and your clients.

From the Foreword by Lincoln C. Bickford M.D. Ph.D.
Keeping the Brain in Mind is that rare gem of a book which seamlessly and accessibly delivers deep theoretical understanding with savvy practical guidance on how to apply it. And it does so with a spirit of curiosity and wonder towards this marvelous instrument, the brain-mind, through which we experience our world. It is a textbook, manual, and mental playground all-in-one. After many years studying the brain as a neuroscientist and learning to work with the mind as a psychiatrist and meditator, it is a refreshing surprise to read something that teaches me equally about both, and which brings new insights into their interplay. In particular, the authors present a series of intuitive and plausible models for how the brain and mind co-create one another, can be understood as metaphors for one another, and can be used to reshape one another bidirectionally in feedback loops for positive change.

I’m not sure exactly where their ‘inside scoop’ is, but Shawn and Melissa have managed to identify most of the developments in neuroscience that I've found most interesting over the years -- such as neuroplasticity, memory reconsolidation, and mirror neurons -- plus a whole lot more. Either they don’t sleep and spend nights poring over the neuroscience literature, or they have an uncanny radar for sorting the wheat from the chaff! They home in on those discoveries that can provide handles by which to understand the most efficient neural avenues to effect change and explain them in straightforward lay terms, they elucidate plausible mechanisms by which many ‘old standard’ NLP patterns -- including the coaching pattern, swish, and fast-phobia cure -- operate on the brain, and they suggest several new technical approaches. They then also flip these neural principles around, translating them into metaphors by which to help clients consolidate and makes sense of their gains and inspire ongoing self-discovery. I would recommend this book even to expert scientists and therapists, expecting that it will reshape, rewire, reconsolidate, and re-enrich understandings and enthusiasm for our fascinating field; it certainly has for me!