Recently there were a number of posts from Joe and Darren regarding fear, negative self talk, stopping the inner critic and the picture from Steven showing a huge slate that people wrote their fears and concerns on. The slate would be subsequestly erased on a daily basis.

I can think of one place that the slate would be put to good use. Last week my wife Carol and I decided to take our children on a day trip to Oakwood, a theme park in Wales. This park is a no frills and plenty of thrills theme park. Earlier in July we were in Euro Disney Paris for a few days and having been to Disney in Florida previously there is no comparision between the Disney parks and Oakwood. At least this was the unanimous decision of my children and nephew. On a side note, I have come to the conclusion that Walt Disney ranks as one of the worlds greatest hypnotists - he's hypnotising thousands of people everday, me included!

However, in Oakwood it was fascinating to listen to the conversations of people as they queued for the various rides. It was very obvious that there was a lot of negative internal dialogue apparent as people battled with confronting their fears. The majority managed to sum up the courage to complete the rides while others gave into their fears.

Could these people have benefited from the services of a hypnotist? Absolutely! Theme parks, particularly Oakwood, where a client's fear can become manifest would be a good testing ground to determine the success of a hypnotic intervention. It may not be the environment that everyone would choose but it's worth considering.

Here's a video of one of the rides that we went on during the day:

When it was time to leave to catch the ferry back to Ireland we all had constant smiles on our faces. It may be because we cheated death or the amount of adrenalin flowing in our system. The only question that was asked on the way home was when are we going back!