Hello,

I have been on these boards for quite some time now. I am getting extremely curious in the fields of Hypnosis/Hypnotherapy and NLP. I have done a little research on NLP but I don't have any background on Hypnosis.

I was looking to take some classes and get my hands on some decent books out there. I figure learning from a master practitioner would be the best way to learn.

Does anyone have any information regarding what is the best ways to learn these areas? Also, I don't want to go to just anyone, I rather get taught by one of the best, so with that, I live in the Northern NJ area and I was curious if anyone has any recommendations.

Thank you.

Take a formal hypnosis training, gain an hypnotist certification, them find a mentor, read all books and watch all DVDs you can.

For Northern NJ area, go to National Guild of Hypnotists (http://ngh.net/) and look at NGH Certified Instructors closer your home http://ngh.net/States/NJ.html

It's a good start.

I strongly agree with MM.

Taking a formal, in-person training is a great start. Combining that with every book and DVD you can find, and a mentor if possible is even better. Trying to learn just from books and DVDs is very difficult for a variety of reasons, perhaps the most important ones being that you don't get to practice on a variety of people with a mentor/instructor watching, and you may not get a thorough and wide-ranging training from reading just the books (or parts of books) that interest you or from videos.

Remember Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is crap. However, it's quite possible to learn from crap, even if all you learn is that you know more than the crap that is in some books. I would add that most books--but not all--written before 1950 or 1960 have a greater value as history than a practical value. Hypnotherapy has evolved incredibly over the last 50 years.

Although I have written a fe whypnosis books, I favor DVD learning. Many good products out there from Brian David Phillips, me, and others. You can click the ad at the top of the hypnosis section or in my signature to find out what we offer.

What I did was I purchased a few dvd's from Nongard and they worked like a charm I highly recommend that you check some of his stuff out

Thanks for the posts everyone. I definitely don't want to learn from books/dvd's alone, I figured formal training would be the best way to start.

Does anyone have any recommendations for the northern NJ area/NYC area? In the meantime, I'm going to go check out the ngh.net web site.

Thanks again.