I often get clients who book hypnosis sessions with me, wanting me to completely transform their lives in one sitting. While this expectation can be positive, as it supports people to make real changes in areas of their life that they aren’t completely satisfied with, it’s also important to manage expectations.
Hypnosis is an incredibly powerful tool for transformation.
It has the power to work on our subconscious to enable us to achieve things that we wouldn’t be capable of alone, and can make a huge difference when it comes to strengthening our willpower and bolstering our confidence. However, the best coach in the world can’t help someone to change or achieve their goals, through hypnotherapy alone.
When anyone wants to tackle a specific area of their life to make positive changes, there needs to be a specific mix of factors in play working together to effect the change. Humans are complicated animals, and we need to have the right set of conditions to trigger off the willpower, determination and positive thinking needed to achieve our goals.
Let’s say, for example, that you came to me for help with losing weight. You told me that you had struggled with weight issues since your early childhood, and you’d been through a destructive cycle of yo-yo dieting, losing and gaining weight, ever since. You knew that you wanted to be slim, but you weren’t sure if you had the willpower to achieve your target weight. You’d heard that hypnosis could be a really valuable tool in supporting positive weight loss, and you wanted to give it a try.
What factors would need to be in place, before you achieved your goal?
Willingness To Embrace Change
I could hypnotise you as effectively as possible, but if you simply weren’t ready to make a change, you would find every excuse under the sun not to lose the weight. You’d realise that you didn’t want to stop eating unhealthily over the Christmas period, or you couldn’t afford to buy a new wardrobe of outfits as your body mass started to decrease. Whenever the positive suggestions provided by my hypnosis prompted you to reduce your calorie intake or exercise, you’d ignore it in favour of reverting back to your own habits.
For hypnosis to work, you have to be really sure that you want the outcome you’re asking for. If you have any doubts or reservations, they will effectively scupper your chances of success.
Belief In The Possibilities
People that enter in to the process of hypnotherapy while being firmly convinced that it won’t work can be really tough customers to support. This is because it takes a two-way partnership between the therapist and client to enable the positive benefits of hypnosis to thrive. If you have already decided that the hypnosis will fail even before you come for your first consultation, the chances are you are probably right.
Hypnosis works best when the client and therapist are working together to achieve a common aim, whether that is weight loss, enhanced confidence, anxiety management or any other goal.
Motivation To Succeed
Hypnosis can only ever be effective for people when they understand that they need to be active participants in the process, and work with me to achieve their goal. If I work with someone to support them to stop smoking, for example, and they immediately light a cigarette as soon as they leave my clinic, all the hypnosis in the world won’t combat their addiction.
Whether the goal is to lose weight, gain confidence, tackle anxiety or any other target, it’s critical that the person undergoing hypnosis recognises the power they have over their own life, and work with the therapy rather than expecting the hypnosis to do all the work, while they continue as they have always done.
If someone wants to take control of their life, feels motivated to change and determined to succeed, hypnotherapy can be an extremely effective way of making positive changes and achieving goals.
However, it’s important to remember that each of us has a huge amount of personal agency when it comes to influencing the outcome of any therapy, and it takes willpower, self-belief and motivation to succeed.
What’s your experience with hypnosis?
Please share your views in the comments below.
