How Hypnosis Can Help You Succeed
Learn faster and more deeply by tapping into your brain's natural learning state
The road to success is paved with acquired skills. But how do you attain skills fast so that you can make your way without delay to where you want to be?
Jack, Jill (her lover) and me
Jack slides into the driver's seat as his dad closes the passenger side door. "Here you are, son," says his dad, as he hands Jack the keys.
Jack hesitates for a moment as if he were being given the keys to the kingdom, not just the family car.
He slips on his seat belt, then puts the key into the ignition. He's full to bursting with a visceral 'this is cool!' excitement. He turns the key, his key in the ignition.
The car clears its throat and hysterically screams into life as Jack's foot stamps down on the gas. Jack is all fingers and thumbs (and feet), he tries to remember everything all at once but remembers nothing.
He's focusing intently on following all the different instructions from his dad. "More gas, less gas, handbrake off, first gear, first gear, FIRST GEAR!"
Jack actually looks down at his feet to check they're where they're meant to be as the tortured car hops and lurches.
The engine dies, stalled into submission. How does anyone do this? He wonders, as his father tries to smile encouragingly through clamped teeth.
BUT...
Flash forward and Jack has passed his test, he can drive safely 'without thinking about it'. He can hop into the car, flip on the radio, and drive smoothly and effortlessly down the driveway and on his way. How hard it was back then is but a distant memory. But with Jill, this shift in competency is even more amazing.
Speaking like a native
Jill has a Spanish lover, Juan (yes it's corny). She loves him, adores him and is going to live with him in Spain. And in his Spanish eyes she is the loveliest lass ever to massacre his home language. Jill has no Spanish or not in the way any Spanish speaking person would recognize.
Her first lesson feels easy if training cats to fetch sticks and jump through hoops on command is easy. Command is what she doesn't have as she fights, wrestles and successfully dodges the Spanish language at every verb, noun or adjective. It all feels so hard.
BUT...
Six weeks later Jill jokes with her teacher in Spanish. She's not fluent but she can have a basic conversation without thinking about it. What about me?
While my guitar gently weeps
I owned a guitar for 15 years but never played it. It would lean against the wall staring at me with bitter reproach like a hurt relative you never call.
And I got so sick of: "Ah do you play? Give us a tune? Oh it's just decorative is it?'
My first lesson left my fingertips feeling like they'd been individually anaesthetized by a vicious medic with a grudge against musical butchery.
"Where does that finger go? What's a semiquaver again? How do I make it not sound like a tortured guinea pig?"
BUT...
Slide tunefully into the future, just weeks and I can play Bach's fugue in G minor, not perfectly, there are no paying customers, but enough to go into flow and enjoy making music with my reconciled instrument.
I at last know the joy of my fingers seeming to know what to do better than I do; of gliding gently along a musical piece on the flow of the moment.
The thing is when you first do something complex it can feel hard, complicated and difficult and many people give up.
But the beautiful feeling of mastering a skill injects delightful confidence into every part of you, and if that skill is linked to a larger success goal, it makes the realizing of your dreams all the more real.
A deeper level of knowing
Jack, Jill and myself all had the experience I'm sure you've had too. Learning went from conscious trying to unconscious capability.
And when that happens it's beautiful and starts to feel much easier. Imagine if you had to consciously think about every single movement, major and miniscule it took you to your clothes on or make a cup of tea, these skills are now (I hope) programmed into you.
Hypnosis is often used for self mastery (think weight control, phobia cures and smoking cessation) but it can also be used to gain mastery of specific skills taking you from conscious incompetence to unconscious competence much more rapidly than normally.
Your hypnotic edge
Hypnosis turns explicit conscious instructions into implicit unconscious actions. When that happens the new knowledge or skill becomes part of who you are. Hypnosis can help this happen quickly.
And when we think about it, emotional skills such as determination, self belief and courage can also be learned during hypnotic trance, nature's greatest learning tool. People can consciously try to feel positively (then feel guilty if they don't) or learn to naturally be positive when they really need to.
The joy of deep down positivity
Have you ever heard someone faced with adversity say, "I suppose I should try to put a positive spin on things. It could be worse, I guess. I'll try to focus on others who have it worse than me."
That's explicit positivity, trying to be positive by applying a set of principles, trying to drive by thinking about every step - foot off the clutch, foot on the accelerator, release the handbrake. How effective do you think that is?
Compare that to someone who is implicitly positive - perhaps that's their natural state, or they have worked on developing that attitude through hypnosis.
When faced with adversity, they don't have to go through the checklist, consciously apply principles, work hard to get the sequence of thoughts right - that happens naturally. It's implicit.
The person with this implicit positivity has positive expectations. They have confidence that they can work through the situations that currently face them. They don't have to implement a checklist; it runs automatically and subconsciously.
Success with hypnosis
That's how you can achieve success with hypnosis; by making implicit those behaviors and attitudes that are essential for success. Focus and concentration, resilience and optimism.
I've worked hard to develop the 10 Steps to a Stellar Success Mindset which uses conscious learning of course but also has 10 hypnotic sessions to get the new skills set naturalized within you as soon as possible to make success feel natural.
Hypnosis can therefore give the implicit skills and attitudes that are critical for success. You can try to consciously apply explicit rules to give you these essential attitudes, perceptions and behaviors.
Explicit application, however, takes time, effort, energy, and moreover, there's absolutely no guarantee of success.
Do you want to approach the key areas of your life as a learner/student driver trying to consciously apply principles, or do you want those principles be inherent in your actions, just like an experienced driver, guiding you effortlessly to success?
If you need a driver, Spanish speaker or diligent guitarist then you know where we are...
