Dr. Yapko is the author of 15 books (including Trancework (5th edition), Taking Hypnosis to the Next Level, Mindfulness and Hypnosis, and The Discriminating Therapist), and editor of three others. These products will not be promoted or sold during this program.

Cognitive psychology, the study of how people think, has given rise to new understandings about how people gather and use information. This includes how people decide, usually at a level outside of awareness, what is salient to pay attention to in a given environment and, likewise, what is essentially irrelevant. When people get sidetracked into irrelevancy, paying too much attention to what doesn’t really matter and too little attention to what does, their perceptions and responses naturally lead them astray. More important, when someone’s perspective is so global or over‐general that he or she simply doesn’t know how or what to decide, he or she is far more likely to make poor decisions on the basis of hurt feelings, old history, misconceptions, or blind faith. Whether making medical decisions that can affect one’s health for a lifetime or making quality of life decisions that can give rise to depression and other emotional difficulties, the value of hypnosis as a means of encouraging patients to make better decisions will be considered in this skill‐building workshop.

At the end of this presentation, attendees will be able to:

- Recognize cognitive style and its effect on experience in general and symptomatic experience in particular.
- Relate how a low tolerance for ambiguity increases the likelihood of poor decision‐making.
- Ask “how” questions that identify the patient’s experiential deficits (i.e., missing or incorrect information that work against his or her effective decision‐making).
- Recognize how a therapist’s cognitive style may hinder treatment results.
- Use hypnosis to help patients make key distinctions that regulate decision‐making related to their presenting problems.