One of the cornerstones of my hypnotherapy training courses is teaching my budding hypnotherapists that it is ok to have fun, when they are in hypnotherapy training and when hey start practicing full-time as a hypnotherapist… Yes indeed, even in hypnotherapy sessions with clients… Let me explain…

Soap Operas seem to promote “serious issues”, our media is heavily punctuated with seriousness… Being serious seems to be proliferating our existence… Then grows into fear… and what with all this recession scaremongering…. Sheeez!!

This weekend I am running my hypnotherapy training diploma and one of the subjects that I am teaching is “how to be happy.”

Hmmm… It is my way of showing my students how to work therapeutically with a variety of people displaying depressive symptoms and thought it a better title to that section of the day than “dealing with depression” which so many hypnotherapy training schools do and never inspired me for the learning ahead….

I must say, on the hypnotherapy diploma course, we laugh a great deal. We really do have fun, I insist upon it… I want to explain why I find it so important…. Firstly, it creates a great learning environment, we learn more when we are happy and laughing… ANd lots of what we learn when we laugh bypasses the conscious faculty.

I watch comedy every week… Heck, I spend lots of my day working with people diagnosed as being depressed, ill, fed-up, limited in some way etc, etc… I think laughter is a crucial tonic to keep me in my merry place. So when you are studying away or engaged upon your hypnotherapy training let me ask you a very important question….

How much do you really laugh?

Not that polite titter you do in response to certain things… I am talking about a full-hearted, belly bursting, proper laugh.

Some people find laughter a serious business! I can remember watching stage hypnotist and hypnosis trainer Paul McKenna running a hypnosis training seminar and anchoring laughter and giggles into someone on stage and he was pretending to be a ‘Gestapo’ like character and kept saying to the guy “You vill not laff! Zis iz seee-ree-uss!” I know, you had to be there, but it took apart the notion of laughter being a serious business, the guy on stage was in fits of giggles and it had me rolling about the place…

Getting fun and laughter out of some folk is like blood out of a stone…. Apparently, the average adult laughs 15 times a day; the average child, more than 400 times. Fair enough, kids are learning their way through feelings and emotions and could be giggling wildly one moment and screaming in anger the next, however, you get my point, don’t you?

The reason I am writing about this today, I think it is important for anyone that is hypnotherapy training, to know that it is well documented that developing and maintaining a sense of humour helps prevent and lift clinical depression because laughing produces ‘feel good chemicals’ and even subdues physical pain, humour helps us reframe events and ‘get outside them’ rather than feeling bogged down by them. A well developed sense of humour attracts other people to us socially and wide social networks are also a preventative and palliative as far as depression is concerned.

Heck, if you need any more convincing of this notion, then watch Robin Williams starring in the film Patch Adams which articulates the point very well indeed… An unconventional doctor who actually encouraged his patients to laugh and be mischievous in the face of more conventional serious healthcare of the time.

We all need to cultivate humour not just to lead happier lives but to encourage flexibility of thought.

Of course people with a sense of humour can develop depressions – some of my favourite comedians apparently suffered from depression – Frankie Howerd, Kenneth Williams (and Benny Hill – not really  favourite of mine) – Though I did watch more than just carry on films as a child developing a sense of humour, hahahaha. You can see it though, can’t you? That is, one of the first symptoms of depression setting in can often be losing ones sense of humour – heck, helping that person find it again could well be just the remedy!

Humour can provide us with seriously important and valid perspectives, goodness, my Mum used to always say “never a truer word is spoken in jest…” I used to frown at her saying that… Until I actually listened to the jokes my friends used to make about each other in the pub at weekends when I was younger and I started to realise!

Some say that people who joke in the face of diversity may be suffering ‘denial’ – ususally it is the stuffy, conventional mindset that thinks such a thing, pulling us into some sort of insistence to conform to being properly miserable…

I’d like to think that instead of denial, they simply possess a developed capacity for objectivity. Never let us forget that it was Oscar Wilde who on his death bed said ‘Either this wallpaper goes or I do!’ Hahaha….

Have you really laughed today; even inwardly? Have you found the humour in what is going on?

When I was at school, I often found myself sat in the front of the headmaster being told off for being naughty… School did not stimulate me, I needed more than just verbatim regurgitation of information as my school curriculum mainly comprised of… Yet whenever I was there perplexing the headmaster (I think it irritated him that I got straight A’s) and he was shouting away, I’d find something ridiculous, I’d find something funny and I’d start giggling… “Eason, stop this insolence!” came the roar… You know what happens when you bottle up giggles, they want to burst out of your skin, they increase and amplify and everything becomes hilarious… Man, that is a glorious sensation.

Even today, the same happens if I have to sit quietly being serious with my solicitor, bank manager or accountant. They must think I am strange for giggling so much…

When we take things seriously, when we make life such a serious business, I think it can become far less flexible… It becomes staid and stagnant and joy finds it hard to exist in such a place… The same is true within hypnotherapy training and actually being a hypnotherapist – or therapist of any kind.

I don’t know about you, but sometimes people make you feel defensive, I used to allow myself to feel defensive, until I started joking and laughing things off… It genuinely is the cornerstone of my therapeutic technique these days and central to my hypnotherapy training …
Humour has always been banned under dictatorships; comedians are seen as a threat. Why? Because humour can illuminate truths, break through the constraints of narrow thinking and puncture self importance. Humour shows we are not afraid. Tyrants hate to be laughed at and they certainly don’t laugh at themselves. But the really surprising truth is that we all live under types of dictatorships.

Human beings often create, then subsequently live within the constraints of their own personal psychological dictatorships.

These personal restrictive ‘jails’ are built on a solid foundation of rigid rules and assumptions of right and wrong, with walls of ’shoulds’ and ‘oughts’ and ‘mustn’ts’, strong bars of perfectionism, unbreakable locks of defeatism, and guards of arrogance on constant duty to ‘be right’. And that arrogance can extend to ‘being right’ that one is totally inferior to other people. Or that life is bad.

The right humour applied at the right time by the right person can work as an escape tunnel…. Burrowing out and away from stifling narrow seriousness and restricted ‘one track’ perception.

Surely these days, we are all increasingly aware of the mental and physical health benefits of regular laughter. Many studies illustrate that genuine laughter  reduces stress hormones, relieves pain, relaxes us and produces endorphins and serotonin. Laughing regularly can ward off depression and help you sleep better and generally enjoy life more. We even call people who make us laugh ‘a real tonic’.

Rght now, if you force a smile onto your face 3 times in a row, you can even feel the small shot of serotonin you just fired into your body from your brain as it associates that within you…

Humour frees up restricted and limiting thinking. In my experience, all good teachers, therapists and leaders have instinctively known how to use humour …. Good hypnotherapy training needs it, good hypnotherapy needs its appropriate use too. My first hypnotherapy training course as a young student was devoid of humour and I look upon that particular hypnotherapy raining as a place where I learned the least… See how much truly exists in your day-to-day existence and think of injecting more… Especially in your hypnotherapy training!

When you are considering hypnotherapy training or any hypnosis training, when you look at hypnotists and hypnotherapists who excel and create good hypnotherapy businesses and make lots of progressive change possible in the world, something that is common-place with those people is… a level of noticeable congruence.

When I had completed my own initial hypnotherapy training, when I was first setting up my business, I attended a large breakfast networking meeting with lots of varying types of businesses and people and one of the speakers was talking about and explaining how online networking had helped him go from redundancy to having his own lucrative business that he really enjoyed running in a relatively short period of time…

He was not  very good speaker at all. The way he talked about himself and his company was rather poor and unprofessional. However, there was something about him that made me want to give him business and that made me like him: He was congruent. He had a deep sense of congruence about him. Something I think is incredibly important in the hypnosis and personal development fields and should form part of any good quality hypnotherapy training.

What do I mean by congruent? I mean that congruence is how you are when what you do matches what you say, and both in turn match what believe…. They are all in alignment.

Congruence is like having a deeper level of honesty about who and how you are as an individual… Congruence is attractive and it is appealing…. Most importantly, it creates trust. The chap at the breakfast meeting was a man who I knew almost nothing about, who (technically) spoke and delivered his message quite badly, yet I liked him and would have spent money with him and his company.

Congruence is not only something that is about how others perceive you. It is also important in how you perceive yourself. If you want to make a powerful change in your life and you really want a particular thing but keep on doing something else, then incongruence will exist in your own perception of yourself too. This can cause loss of balance and will shine through in your communication… And how we communicate verbally and non-verbally as hypnotists and hypnotherapists is crucial, right? That is why I say that this notion should form part of every hypnotherapy training.

For anyone looking to enhance and devlop their level of congruence, I always suggest that you work out what your values are. The next step to congruence is simply to honour those values. You know what values are, don’t you? Values are what is important to you.

As someone completing a hypnotherapy training, a prime example of one of your values may be helping others. Being in business may mean you have a value of having security, enjoying freedom. Many people that are doing hypnotherapy training may well have the value of continuous learning. I could go on and on.

Maybe you have not spent years flicking through self-help books or been on courses for self-improvement, so maybe values are new to you… One way you can find out what you value is to identify something you really want, then ask yourself this question:

“What will that give me that I wouldn’t otherwise have?”

When you have subsequently answered that question to yourself, ask it again.

Ask yourself; What do I want? An example response might be : To reduce my weight.

Then you ask: What will that give me that I wouldn’t otherwise have?” The answer might be: A body I can feel comfortable showing off.

Then ask again: What will that give me that I wouldn’t otherwise have? The answer may well be: Freedom.

To get the most from asking yourself that question, you need to take the question as far as you can until you get the simplest answer and the question can be asked no more. When you go as far as you can, you end up with a core value: what it is that’s really important to you. In this example it was freedom. Knowing this can begin to install congruence within you that others can feel when they are around you.

Secondly here, pay attention to your body. That also needs balance and congruence.

Your body and your neurology have been developed over thousands of years to provide you with very accurate and real feedback about congruence and balance. It is like we have a HUGE antenna stuck out of the top of our head that tells the entire world what it is we are actually thinking… Even the tiniest of cues get picked up on by the unconscious minds of others… ANyone within a ourse of hypnotherapy training knows that, right?

If you are at a dinner party and you are smiling and chatting nicely and being charming but all the time you are thinking “I cannot stand these people” that uncomfortable feeling in your body and thought in your mind is an incongruent signal – a lack of balance – a sign that you are “out of tune.” When you have a deep sense of peace and joy, genuine balance, really truly enjoying the company of those people, then that is a sign that you are aligned and are subsequently going in the right direction. The rammifications for a hypnosis session are such that if you do not believe that the person you are with is going to be hypnotised, then they are unlikely to… If you do not believe in yourself to help them create the change they want… What does that suggest???

You level of congrunce will affect your hypnosis skills as well as your therapeutic results! It affects how people perceive your hypnotherapy training! If your beliefs, non-verbal signals, values and language are not aligned, then incongruence will be communicated within your communication, wherever it may be. This is being communicated unconsciously, hypnotically if you like.

I could tell that the chap at the breakfast meeting was loving his work… When you do what you love, enjoying your life and then letting go of as much of the other stuff as possible, you get to spend more and more time experiencing a sense of joy, fulfilment and happiness. As well as being great fun, this is also highly attractive – people really like to be around someone who is doing what they love! That includes you being around yourself. You will love yourself a lot more when you are enjoying what you are doing and potential customers and clients.

One of the things my mentor loves doing is running the various hypnotherapy training courses that he runs regularly. Things like his hypnotherapy training diploma for example is one of the most powerful approaches that I have encountered for helping people to live congruently, with balance and creating the lives that bring them joy and happiness. When he is running hypnotherapy training courses or seminars; to experience other people making powerfully progressive changes to heighten their own experience of themselves for themselves, ensures that he experiences that sense of deep congruence and balance that comes from being fully himself.

You may have encountered people whose behaviours do match their values. This person is congruent, and that congruence sends an unconscious message to people and to yourself, your own mind, that says “you can trust this person to do what they say they will.” So I recommend anyoe in te hypnosis field continue to check with themselves as to whether their goals are clear to them and whether their actions fit in with those values.

I think when you do so, it creates a much more receptive, hypnotic environment. Now that is quality hypnotherapy training!

Just this week, I found myself in one of those unenviable situations… One of those situations that we dread occurring in social circumstances… Being trapped by someone we find boring! Aaggghhhh….

I know what you are thinking “Surely Adam is not suggesting someone was boring… Surely he is far too evolved to think such unkind thoughts…”   I may be putting you off my hypnotherapy training diploma unless I remedy this fast!

Hey, come on, I am human too – sometimes I need someone to ignite some fuses in my brain. Sometimes I need stimulation too! Sometimes I do encounter someone that may seem a bit dull at the time… Maybe he was just having a bad day… Why I am telling you this on a hypnotherapy training blog? Let me explain…
The point I want to make is that I became lazy and easily distracted and found my eyes and mind wandering all over the place when this chap was talking to me. I realised what was happening and felt awful… It is so unattractive, unappealing and says so much about you at the unconscious level when you are not paying attention. So I set my mind to it, brought my awareness in and found rapport developing quicker than I had first anticipated. Imake sure all the students on my hypnotherapy training diploma pay much more attention to their clients!

One of the biggest challenges for many of us when communicating in social circumstances, business environments or anywhere else (therapy room included!), is to give someone your absolute, uninterrupted attention. Where your attention is 100%. Being truly attentive is attractive, it helps you develop rapport, it sends many positive signals and aids any communication….

That is one of the reasons I have issues with hypnotherapists and hypnotists continually referring to scripts! How can you be paying attention to anything else if you are reading a script? How connected are you actually being to your client? Do you really need to attend a good hypnosis training or a quality hypnotherapy training diploma to learn to read a script?

You see, so often, outwardly we may appear to be listening to the individual we are communicating with, (even if they are not speaking, there is much to listen to) though internally we may be guessing what they are thinking, jumping to conclusions, considering our response, making assumptions or daydreaming – as I was in the example I opened up with.

If we do not keep pulling our awareness inwards, our minds can simply board any passing express train of thought. Our thoughts can distract us, cloud our minds and block our receptivity to what is actually going on – we may miss out on a wide variety of levels, when there is richness in every communication for us to behold…. Including when we are conducting hypnosis in any form… This needs to be learnt at the hypnotherapy training level in my opinion.

I recall a time when I was at a networking breakfast meeting and I had not fully woken up and found myself embroiled in small talk with three members of the meeting while we were waiting to be seated for breakfast. I was aroused to find them all staring at me expectantly… They were waiting to a reply from a question I had been asked when my mind had wandered far, far off to a galaxy far away… Very embarrassing.

Have you ever done something similar? Have you been listening to someone and found yourself asking, ‘Sorry, what was that you just said?’ How unattractive, rude, and inconsiderate. What does that say about you to the other person? You would certainly not expect something similar from a hypnotherapist who had undergone extensive hypnotherapy training, would you?

I can remember reading about Zen Masters that used to come up behind their students and smack them hard on the head. The purpose of which was to remind the students that they weren’t present or truly aware of what was going on around them at that moment. If they had been, they would have noticed and been able to move out of the way, or even avoid such an approach being made.

Now I am not going to suggest that you tell your friends and family to start creeping around and attempt to wallop you on the head to keep you on your toes, instead, use one of many, many methods that are out there and documented to give you an alternative way to focus your attention and stop it wandering rudely off and giving a bad impression to whoever you may be communicating with.

MIlton Erickson went into trance with clients and patients… I do too… As do many of the greatest hypnotists I know… Good hypnotherapy training courses teach this notion… Such a state allows you to be inherently aware of what is right, what is going on with the person you are working with and so on… It is a eep focus that is a joy to experience… Do you think renowned hypnotherapist Erickson ever read a script while hypnotising?

Many people tell me that they find it difficult to pay attention and that when they attempt to do so, it is almost stressful and creates anxiety. This is demonstrating that they are focusing on their thoughts and not placing their attention on the individual they are concerned with.

Paying attention also means being relaxed. When you correctly pay attention, you are not thinking about what is going to happen, you are not thinking about what has happened before, you are just there, in the present, as things are happening. That way you get pure information, you connect with the individual and on the unconscious level, you are making yourself more pleasing – whether it is as a therapist, a colleague or friend. What’s more, you are much more likely to come up with a good, appropriate and relevant response to their communication…

Then you rely on yourself to deliver good solutions from your hypnotherapy training based on your knowledge, understanding and hypnotic language skills (if you do not have those skills, then practice them!) … Not read a script! Any Tom, Dick or Harry can do that… Why would you pay for the service of having someone read to you?

I’m sure you’d agree that it’s nice to be appreciated, listened to and given warmth… How many scripts offer up felt warmth? Pah!

Scripts are useful to read, learn from and develop understanding and ideas from… I have included scripts in my books… With the express accompanying notion that they be used for learning and not verbatim regurgitation! Scripts are someone else’s language… They do not respond or necessarily resonate with your client… Even if you write them yourself, they are still a blanket approach… Even if you wrote it specifically for that client… The script does not resonate with the moment they are in or the experience they are having… You would not even know what experience they are having if you are reading… Heck, I am going to go the whole hog and say that if a hypnotherapist read them to a client, then, their hypnotherapy training can’t have been that good.

I got asked about setting up in business as a hypnotherapist today. I thought I’d share my thoughts… This is something that should be considered at the stage of hypnotherapy training… Prior to being in practice… I certainly wish I’d have known this when I was training as a hypnotherapist.

I’d like to offer up some wisdom that is not my own… to those starting up in our business… Some guidance that I was given by one of my first mentors… I know when I started as a single chap with no mortgage, family of my own or even responsibilty of any kind, I still found it tough to find and discover the best ways to set up a successful and thriving hypnotherapy or personal development buiness. So those with all those responsibilities can find it a soul-destroying, lonely environment at first after just completed a hypnotherapy training course… Let me explain further for you…

The thing that helped me the most, without a doubt?

Ok, you need to become a niche therapist. That’s right you really do need to be a specialist. Focus on your little wedge. It is so much bigger than you realise. It is actually a huge wedge. You can still see people for other things, but get known as being an expert in your niche. Even though it sounds like you are limiting yourself, I guarantee you will get the phone ringing off the hook. You must become the expert in your niche. If there is already an expert in your niche, be the second best. You must have a niche… I just read that back and saw how many times I wrote the word must… Ahem… Excuse me…

What’s more, you have to think about this while you are undertaking your hypnotherapist training!

Having a niche enables you to think nationally or globally. So that you stop thinking locally or provincially. Get out of the notion of being provincial. Battling it out in the doldrums alongside all the other local therapists in the Yellow Pages is a tough place to exist…

I have people from all over the country here and other places come to see me; they are stepping over thousands of people to get to me on the way. I think if you do what you can to become the best and be thoroughly educated in your niche, and know everything that there is to know in your niche… Then that is the way forward…

As an example, my first ever book “The Secrets of Self-Hypnosis” was a best seller and (although Iam totally biased and I know it) my additional Self-Hypnosis masterclass work that builds upon it, cannot be matched… “BOLD statement to post up on a hypnotherapy Training blog Adam” I hear you say… I have more research findings on using self-hypnosis than anyone can imagine. There are no other book or audio programmes out there that can match what I have to offer in this niche… That is 30 hours of material I can recite at the drop of a hat… Not impressive for the girls or friends in the pub, I realise But I know my niche…

My good pal in the US Kevin Hogan built his practice in the early days with a fabulous hypnotherapy training programme for overcoming tinnitus, I know lots of others that have gained such credibility from doing similar things… It was/is Kevin that introdued me to this idea.

Then you can think globally. Market yourself as a global or national hypnotherapist; get your specialist area that you work in, in which you are the expert and people will travel around the world to reach you…. Medical professionals will refer you… Heck, they cannot know everything there is to know about every aspect of healthcare can they?

If your market place is made bigger, then your business thrives, doesn’t it?

My experience has been that if you have a niche, you do not need to attempt to be some incredible panacea-type therapist making claims all over the place… A good thriving business is also based on a solid foundation of credibility in my opinion… Niche and credibility seem to go rather nicely hand-in-hand in my opinion.

Are you a therapist or a miracle worker? You want to separate yourself from the charlatans. Unfortunately they are out there; they do exist and you do not want to be associated with those people. Many people associate you with those who make extraordinary claims. You want to have a very successfully designed understanding to how your therapy and your niche works.

We want to create a distinction between the experienced professional and the charlatan… Being a specialist in your niche does that… I make this notion part of my own hypnoterapy training diploma and work out a congruent message from within that niche with all my students… That is how important I think it is to do this at the hypnotherapy training stage.

What expectations should there be in between the client and therapist? There are lots of therapists that are not portraying themselves as they should. Stories of miracles are often exaggerated. My own skin disorder being cured with hypnotherapy brought me into this field, yet I would never make claims that I can cure that same disorder in everyone who comes through my door…

I have read and seen miraculous spontaneous remissions with cancer. When someone has been filled with it and then free of it the next week. These are rare. I have been involved in a handful of clients that have had seemingly miraculous recoveries. They are exceptions. I have seen more clients than almost any other therapist I have met. These seemingly miraculous instances are rare, so I do not tell people that it happens all the time… I think that is credibility and that is the beauty of niche, no exaggeration or need to sell yourself is required… It is inherent… And sells itself…

Delusions of grandeur occur in therapy. Dare I say it, especially in hypnotherapy… I mean, just look around you

My twopenneth for the day… A real golden key to hos considering or within a programme of hypnotherapy training.

The more hypnotherapy training I encounter, and the more newly qualified hypnotherapists I meet, the more I get thoughtful about what is more of a philosophy that I believe to be very rewarding regardless of your take on any kind of personal development.

I love people sharing their work. Throughout our hypnotherapy training we get to read and understand the work of others… It is essential for our development in our field. Yet I think congruence and developing your own unique, tantalising style within this field is the key to success. I utterly labour this point in my own hypnotherapy training… Utterly! Let me explain some more…

Which I why I often despair at others attempting to become clones of those they respect and admire instead of learning from them and adapting their own unique way. You’ll be infinitely better at hypnotising people if they trust you, and far better at therapy of course… I think having others detect you are being your true self enhances trust, it shows credibility and a belief in yourself… Heck, if you don’t believe in yourself, then why should anyone else?

Let me share with you something that happened to me earlier this year…

Here in England – Shrove Tuesday in February, which is the beginning of Lent in religious terms and that is when people should use up the remains of their larder before they fast. Typically, this would be flour, eggs and milk – Pancakes!! Yay. I love eating pancakes.

So indeed, earlier this year, during pancake day I made pancakes with a variety of toppings. I have been to a great deal of pancake celebrations and I want to tell you about one particular occasion that serves as a very interesting metaphor for what I am writing about today.

I made a big load of pancake batter – I made it with wholemeal flour so the pancakes were not as they usually are. They were received well and eaten by all. In England one of the traditional ways to eat pancakes is with lemon juice and sugar. We had all kinds of toppings and things laid out – I mean lots and lots of choice.

One of my friends is very English and fanatically kept on saying how wonderful it was to have Lemon juice and sugar and everyone agreed and the vast majority of people there ate the pancakes I made to my recipe with the topping sold to them by one of my friends. Interesting. I piled on strawberry jam, natural yoghurt and toasted almonds on to mine and scoffed the lot down. Yummy!

I wonder if you’ve ever read a brilliant book entitled “The Fountainhead” by a favourite author of mine, Ayn Rand?

The lead character has red hair, so I liked him instantly! The real reason I liked the main character is because of his sense of individualism. I am not going to get political here, I just want you to think about how much you think for yourself because this is important in so many aspects of our hypnosis skills developed throughout our hypnotherapy training.

How individual do you allow yourself to be?

I want to suggest that we can all make a unique contribution to the world and life – in the way we are and the way we allow ourselves to be. We do not have to invent anything other than our own existence with our own vision… That includes what we do and how we do it in relation to our hypnosis skills.

So many people that I work with in my therapy rooms, that I meet at hypnosis conferences, and audiences I speak to, are afraid of failure or success. Afraid of what others might think. Afraid to do things differently to their friends. Afraid of doing things that their parents would not have done and subsequently all have lived a life with a sublte taste of dissatisfaction.

We humans cannot survive except through our minds. Our brain is what we are armed with when we are born. Everything we are and everything we have comes from a single attribute – the function of our reasoning mind. So why not be in control of our minds and allow them to be free for us to use as we choose? I believe this is so important to find true happiness… And for others to find true happiness is our work as hypnotists and therapists.

Now the mind is an attribute of the individual. I bet my mind is different to yours and yours is different to everyone else you know. There is no such thing the as a collective brain. We are each unique. Our mind is unique, isn’t it?

Many of us find safety and protection in numbers and I understand that, how about getting naked every now and then though? Please, not literally…

The next time you leave the house, or the office, have a very good look around you. How much of what you see would have existed if someone had not designed and built it? Wherever you are reading this now – look around you – all of that stuff was an idea in someone’s mind once. Someone who thought their own thoughts.

How about the next time you use your hypnosis skills, you use them as you. Completely you. Ok, so you adapt facets of yourself, but you be congruent about who you are and how you are and be comfortable in the honesty and transparency of it?

So the stories you articulate your skills with are your own and resonate with reality.

How much of your creative, critical thinking faculty are you using today?

We are often taught that it is a virtue to swim with the current. How many times did you go against the current today? I am not suggesting that you be different just for the sake of it, just that you do what fulfils and inspires you and those you work with.

We are often taught that it is a virtue to stand together. I guess the ethos of a forum such as this is inherently so, eh? When was the last time you stood alone? Metaphorically, when was the last time you chose not to have lemon and sugar on your pancakes and had your strawberry jam, natural yoghurt and almonds?

I’d just love to see hypnotists trusting who they are a great deal more, regardless of foibles and idiosyncrasies, without worrying about what others think to such an extent that they attempt to be someone else… Because attempting to be too much like others waters down the original… And I think we are all so much better being authentic.

Ok, it’s off my chest…

My first key point in relation to good quality hypnotherapy training – be unique, be congruent and be yourself…

Good quality hypnotherapy training in the UK that reaches the standards I would expect is actually harder to find that you first realise. Hypnosis training is one thing, just hypnotising is only the first step – there are many great schools, books and teachers out there for that, however doing therapy when someone is in hypnosis is an entriely different kettle of fish.

That is why this blog is here folks. To really get under the skin of a good, quality hypnotherapist training. I am going to write about what good hypnotherapy training is as well as include video and audio clips and then we are really going to explore this subject. I am looking forward to it!