Yesterday I quietly crossed a milestone. My 40th hypnotherapy session.
It is not something I advertise. It started last year, after I finished an NLP practitioner and Ericksonian Hypnotherapy course at UNLP here in the Netherlands. I offered free sessions on Facebook just to practice. It grew from there.
Why I went back
I have repeated the hypnotherapy modules more than once. Not because I had to. Because I find it absolutely fascinating how powerful the unconscious mind is. The more I sit with it, the more it teaches me about how everything else works.
So I have recently decided to redo the NLP practitioner and add an NLP Master certification, this time through David Key’s course. His program works from raw, real-world coaching session recordings. Less theory. More craft.
The thread, through Dilts
If you look at this through the lens of Dilts’ Neurological Levels, it all comes down to Mission.
These fields are not separate to me. They are completely complementary.
As an AI engineer, my focus is on engineering the external world: optimizing digital frameworks, data structures, operational logic. But to truly fulfill my mission of solving complex problems and helping people, I knew I also wanted to focus on engineering the internal world.
One is helping companies. The other is helping people more directly.
What it has done to the technical work
Diving deep into NLP and behavioral patterns has not distracted me from my technical focus. It has sharpened it.
It has changed how I approach active listening, user requirements, and guiding teams through major technical change management. Patterns are patterns, whether the system under examination is code, an enterprise estate, or a person in front of you.
And the writing
During the course I underwent hypnotherapy myself. Something shifted then. An urge to express myself in ways I had not wanted or needed before. The writing started and has not stopped.
From ITAM and AI engineering to international law, psychology, and identity. I write about what I see threads between. It does not make me an expert. It makes me someone who notices patterns across fields.
Close
Ultimately, whether you are building an AI framework or guiding someone through hypnotherapy, it is all the same operation: understanding patterns, unlocking hidden potential, and debugging the ultimate complex system.
I love helping people. This is my way of doing it outside the screen.