Sometimes when people come to me for hypnotherapy they don’t know where to start. They might come with a list of issues that seems overwhelming to them. They may talk about needing hypnosis to be more confidence, being less anxious, getting more sleep or losing more weight.
And it’s my job to help them evolve their list of issues into a goal and then to choose the very first stepping stone we can take together towards that goal.
It’s important we choose the right hypnotherapy goal
Choosing the right goal is key and it’s important the goal is the client’s goals, not mine or anyone else’s. There are plenty of times and in our lives when people tell us what our goals ought to be, should be and could be and my therapy room isn’t one of them.
Of course what I can do is guide my clients towards a better understanding of what they’d like their goal to be. And I can help ensure my clients are in fact choosing a goal, which isn’t always as straightforward as we expect. Sometimes things that look like goals aren't really goals at all.
We need to be sure we have a goal and not something disguised as a Goal
Another part of my job is helping my clients ensure the goals they choose are actually goals. Sometimes our initial attempts at stating a goal don’t give us a goal, instead they give us the means by which we’ll get there. We are stating the method of transport if you like, rather than the destination we’re heading for, and if we do that there’s a risk we end up heading in the wrong direction.
So let’s say you came to me and said “I want to become more assertive”. That isn’t yet a goal, we have more exploration to do. We want to know what being assertive would mean to you. The differences being assertive would make in your life, how you’d be feeling and what would ‘being assertive’ enable you to do that you can’t do now.
We might even want to ask who else would notice the difference in you, what would they notice and what that means.
We would keep exploring and the outcome of this process is our goal. Your goal might come into view really quickly, it might take a bit of work. But either way it’ll be worth the effort .
And we’ll know we have it, because the goal then starts to feel real to you and you start to feel motivated to take the first step.
And from an hypnotherapy point of view, you have started to built a personal, internal three dimensional future for your subconscious mind to aim for. We know where we’re going, the stepping stones can start to appear in front of us and we can be confident we’re heading in the right direction. And we are ready to make the most out of our hypnotherapy sessions.