Dear Members of ISH,
Now, as we begin 2021, we are looking back to a really very special 2020.
If I look back on my year as President of ISH, it was very different than planned.
In the first two weeks of January, 2020, I taught in Beijing for the Chinese Hypnosis Association, an ISH Constituent Society. We were still feeling the joy from the very successful First Asian Congress of Hypnosis in Iran, with 1000+ participants from 25 countries.
In Beijing, we were planning meetings for three future Congresses. A National Chinese Congress with 8-10 International speakers in July 2020, a 2nd Asian Congress July 2022 in Beijing, and then making a bid for the next ISH International Congress 2024 also in Beijing, China. This was the plan.
But a few days after arriving back home in Germany, the Corona problem started in China. First, we tried to support our Chinese friends in developing mental techniques for colleagues working in Covid19 hospital and those responsible for large groups of people in quarantine. We also helped to organize additional equipment in the form of masks and protection cloth. Some weeks later, our Chinese colleagues helped us the other way around and arranged the transport of masks for European Clinics and Old People Homes who had In March-May, not enough protection material for working safely.
Meanwhile, it also became clear that a live congress in China in July would not be possible. In order to train and pay for the organizing staff who had been working on the congress, our Chinese colleagues decided to conduct a virtual congress. It was a lot of work and very stressful for the organizers, but it also was a big success. Still, since it was a great challenge and took much energy, all international conference plans for 2022 and 2024 in China are on hold for the moment.
Although the BOD members had lots of extra work at their workplaces to respond to the pandemic, the ISH BOD continued to work on several projects.
We worked on fully installing our new membership administration platform, SilkStart. The new system makes administration much more effective, so we need fewer staff hours and save ISH financial resources. That said, not everything is working perfectly with the new system. For example, when we started the election process for President-Elect and Secretary/Treasurer, we found that Silkstart has not built an election system that is really keeping confidential who was voting for whom. So our chief administrator, Shady Tonn, identified a separate voting tool that was both safe and inexpensive.
ISH’s high-quality newsletter continues to be published four times a year under the effective guidance of the newsletter’s editor, Katalin Varga. We welcome any news, reports, and interesting stories that could be published in the newsletter. Please send them to varga.katalin@ppk.elte.hu
Giuseppe de Benedittis has continued successfully to promote the scientific recognition of hypnosis by the WHO throughout 2020.
We are in at the beginning of the new project on how to support research in the field of hypnosis.
And throughout the year, the ISH BOD continues to be thankful for the continued contributions and help from the USA Administrator, Julie Linden, and other volunteers, such as Nicole Ruysschaert.
We also are thankful for colleagues supporting the work of ISH in comittees like Susanna Carolusson, Laurence Sugarman, Consuelo Casula, Stephane Radoykov, Raphael Kolic.
And of course we are thankful to our Past-President Committee with Camillo Loriedo, Peter Bloom, Eva Banyai, Julie Linden, Eric Vermetten, Karen Olness, Walter Bongartz. They regularly support us when we need advice.
Woltemade Hartman has carried out a very detailed data collection on hypnosis training standards in the member societies, evaluated them, and developed proposals for future ISH standards on these issues with a team of board members.
We have collected trances and resources in many languages worldwide to cope with the pandemic crisis and made valium buy them available on our webpage (https://www.ishhypnosis.org/news-events/news/) and the ISH blog (https://www.ishhypnosis.org/blog/). The social media team directed by Ceci Fabre is doing great work. We have received a lot of good feedback for this internationally. Anyone who has additional sound files, trance scripts, or concepts for handling this pandemic crisis is welcome to send the to us at:mail@bernhard-trenkle.de
The platform www.whoISHwho.com has also been further developed, and we ask all members to upload or send us their profiles such as CV, photo, and publication list. Please go to this platform, and you can find many interesting colleagues and lots of exciting topics connected with hypnosis.
Under Shady Tonn’s leadership, the administration continues to do an excellent and highly committed job. We have two new members in the administrative staff team, Franziska Mueck and Julie Eisele. Suzanne Malik has left our executive team end of 2020. We thank her and her husband, Jeff, for all the excellent work they have done for ISH. We will introduce the new team members in our next newsletter.
Our planned ISH BOD meeting that had been scheduled to occur in June 2020 in Krakow fell victim to the virus. We hope for a much better year in 2021 and have planned a live meeting of the new Board of Directors for August 2021 in Krakow, if this is possible.
At the end of August 2020, I met with the organizing team of the International Conference, which had been planned for June 2021, in Poland. On a nice vacation place in the middle of nature, we worked two full days to organize this conference. At that point in time, it still seemed possible to hope for having a great real live meeting in June 2021 in Krakau. However, by the end of October, as the virus continued to spread, it became clear that we have to postpone our congress for one year. It will occur from June 8 to June 11, 2022, www.hypnosis2022.com.
However, the COR meeting with board elections will still take place online in June 2021, as planned. The President-Elect and Secretary/Treasurer elections will close by the middle of January 2021. The two positions are elected by ISH members directly. We have excellent candidates for President-Elect as well as for Secretary/Treasurer.
The rest of the BOD will be elected in an online zoom meeting in June 2021 by the Council of Representatives (COR). Every Constituent Society (CS) is sending representatives to this COR Meeting. And the COR will be electing all the other seats in ISH BOD.
The collegial, friendly atmosphere in the ISH board is extraordinarily good, despite corona stress. We have regular board meetings every 4-8 weeks via the Internet. In just 90 minutes, many items on the agenda are dealt with, decided on, and tasks assigned unusually quickly and productively.
If you are interested in becoming a member of the 2021-2024 BOD, please contact us. And if you know of a colleague who would be a good match for our international and friendly BOD atmosphere, please nominate that colleagues in advance.
Wishing you all a good start in a great new year.
During summer time around June to beginning of September we have to apologize for some delays in answering and handling membership issues. This had a special reason. Our secretary/treasurer Enayat Shahidi got a corona infection in doing his duty as a MD. Temporarily, he was in Intensive Care Unit ICU in hospital. We are more than happy that he is back now with full energy.
Please continue to support the work of ISH and renew your membership in ISH (https://ishhypnosis.silkstart.com/auth/login).
And please do all you can to motivate your colleagues also to join ISH. My dream is to interconnect the leading minds in the field of hypnosis as the members of the big strong ISH.
With patience and gratitude,
Bernhard Trenkle
ISH – President