A weird Saturday morning experience

Category: Editorial

I have been moving home over the last few weeks with all the disruption that entails. I am delighted, therefore, to welcome Andrew Halfacre as this week's visiting editor.

Andrew Halfacre - associate Saturday morning. Early. Before 7am. I'd just dropped my daughter off at swimming, late. And I was in a befuddled, not enough sleep, state so I drove off to McDonalds to refuel.

As I was standing in queue deciding what to have I looked longingly at the chocolate donuts and had a very strong thought that I wanted one but then thought no, I'll have a bottle of Tropicana instead – much better for me.

Now I've been a Trainer of NLP and worked with rapport and hypnotic language for at least 3-4 years so what happened next was very odd.

The young lad who served me looked as befuddled as me and certainly as if he had just struggled out of bed as he was moving at the usual McDonalds teenage serving speed i.e. slow and deliberate.

I'm pretty sure that I said "Two black coffees and a Tropicana in a tray please". But I'm equally sure that I was holding a strong unaffected image of a chocolate donut in my mind. So, he keyed in the coffees and then there was a confused look on his face and it took him ages to key in the next thing which he corrected twice. It was cheaper than I expected but I wasn't really paying attention to the till.

He started one coffee in the machine, went and found some tongs, proceeded to pick up a donut, put it in a bag and gave it to me along with the 2nd coffee.

I walked out bemused. I'd got what I wanted but not what I asked for! What had just happened?

I don't know. I'm certain that I said Tropicana and also certain that as I said it, I waved my hand vaguely in the direction of the storage cabinet that has both donuts and the orange juice.

Could it be that my unconscious communication came through unaffected in my less than conscious state? Could it be that in his less than conscious state he received my unconscious communication more clearly?

The only other thing I can relate it to was two workshops I ran on separate occasions in a less than conscious state - one where I was almost too ill to stand up and one where I spent most of the workshop wishing I was in bed somewhere else. Whilst these might seem shocking confessions, these were workshops that I could easily run automatically AND on both times I got some of the best evaluations ever. So much so that I'm seriously wondering whether to take my conscious mind along any more?

I'd love to hear from any of you who may have had similar
experiences....

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