Paul McKenna

Paul McKenna is a British hypnotist, behavioural scientist, broadcaster, and self-help author born on 8 November 1963 in Enfield, London. His father worked as a builder and his mother as a home economics teacher. McKenna attended St Ignatius College, where he experienced bullying from teachers related to his dyslexia. He made his Broadway debut in 1998 with Paul McKenna's Hypnotic World.

McKenna entered broadcasting at age 16 through Radio Top Shop and subsequently worked at Radio Caroline and Capital London before spending two years at BBC Radio 1 in the early 1990s. His television career began with The Hypnotic World of Paul McKenna, which ran from 1993 to 1997, followed by The Paranormal World of Paul McKenna from 1996 to 1997 and Hyp the Streets in 1999. The Television and Radio Industries Club recognised his early television work with its Best TV Newcomer award in 1994. In 2005, he hosted I Can Change Your Life on Sky One, a programme combining hypnotism with therapy. From February 2014 to September 2015, he hosted McKenna on Hulu, conducting interviews with figures including Simon Cowell, Ryan Seacrest, Roger Moore, Rachael Ray, Tony Robbins, and Richard Dawkins.

McKenna's interest in hypnotism developed after a guest appeared on one of his programmes. He studied the discipline under Richard Bandler, the co-creator of neuro-linguistic programming, with whom he maintained a long working relationship. While at Capital Radio, he began performing small hypnosis shows in pubs, clubs, university events, and UK military bases. A regular Sunday night residency at the Duke of York's Theatre, then owned by Capital Radio, followed, and the success of those performances led to engagements across the UK, Ireland, the Netherlands, the United States, Australia, and Hong Kong. His Broadway appearance in 1998 was part of this broader international stage career. McKenna has also worked with celebrity clients in one-to-one hypnotherapy sessions, including helping Daryl Hannah manage stage fright during her run in The Seven Year Itch.

In 1996, McKenna received a PhD from LaSalle University in Louisiana, an institution that was legally licensed by the state but falsely represented itself as accredited. The university exempted him from coursework on the basis of prior experience, and his dissertation consisted of producing a series of self-help recordings that were later published as the book Change Your Life in Seven Days. After the accreditation issue came to light, McKenna pursued a second PhD in 2003 from Revans University, an online institution based in the Republic of Vanuatu, with a thesis titled "The Effects of Fixed Action Patterns and Neuro-Linguistic Programming in Determining Outcomes in Human Behaviour." Revans University had its accredited status revoked in 2005 after it was found that students were exploiting a legal loophole rather than completing the standard level of dedicated research.

McKenna has been involved in several notable legal proceedings. In 1999, he successfully sued both the Daily Star and the National Enquirer for libel after each published articles claiming he had caused psychological harm to a man hypnotised during one of his stage shows. Both cases resulted in six-figure settlements. A prior civil suit brought by the man himself had been dismissed by a judge who found no evidence that McKenna's stage hypnosis posed a risk to participants. In 2006, McKenna sued the Daily Mirror over claims by former television critic Victor Lewis-Smith that his LaSalle qualification was a fraudulent degree purchased to deceive the public. McKenna won the case, and the newspaper was ordered to pay £75,000 in costs. Justice Eady noted that while the academic standing of the degree was a separate question, McKenna had not believed the degree to be bogus or that he had misled anyone by using the PhD designation.

McKenna presents seminars covering hypnosis, neuro-linguistic programming, weight loss, motivation, Zen meditation through the Big Mind method, Amygdala Depotentiation Therapy, and the Havening techniques. He specialises in post-traumatic stress disorder, severe trauma, pain control, and emotional overwhelm, and is the author of multiple self-help and personal development books.