Hypnosis is a self-development tool. With it you can enter a deeply relaxed state where your critical and analytical mind goes to a sleep like state and you are able to give suggestions to your subconscious mind directly. With this self-improvement tool you are able to deeply embed affirmations, get rid of bad habits, past experiences, and negative emotions.
For business owners hypnosis can be used to release stress, let go of past failures, increase confidence and sales mastery, increase public speaking skills, memory and focus, goal setting, sleep improvement. Manage situational stress to name a few.
With hypnosis you can learn NEW HABITS by literally retraining your mind!
Hypnosis is state of extreme suggestibility, relaxation and heightened imagination. It is a lot like day dreaming or a feeling similar to getting lost in a good movie or a book. You are fully conscious but your attention is fully and completely on what is being said. Just like how you would tune out everything around you that is not the book or the movie you are really in to, in hypnosis you would tune out unnecessary things and focus intensely on hypnosis without effort.
A good movie or a book can get you in a dream like trance, make the characters and situations seem real, engaging your emotions fully. They can cause you to feel real fear, sadness, happiness and catch you by surprise and make your jump in your seat. Some researchers categorize such trances as forms of self-hypnosis. This idea was fully recognized by the 20th century hypnosis expert Milton Erickson. As such, we hypnotize ourselves with the advertisements we see, the words we here in everyday life and accept suggestions from parents, siblings, life partners and even TV commercials.
In conventional hypnosis, you approach the suggestions of the hypnotist or your own ideas as if they were reality. And you experience the suggestions with sensory perceptions and heightened emotions that are beneficial to you. If the hypnotist suggest that you are biting in to a sour lemon, you’ll smell the citrus, taste the sourness and make a face. You are playing pretend on an intense level just as children to when they play. In this hypnotic state, you are relaxed, have tuned out all the doubts and thought processes, just like you would forget everything when you go to a cinema and simply enjoy the movie.
In this state, you are highly suggestible. So when the hypnotist says you do something, you’ll probably embrace the idea fully. This is also why guided hypnosis shows results faster than self-guided hypnosis alone would. You are able to let go completely of the outcome and enter the suggestible state much more easily, making the process of hypnosis more efficient.
Theory of Mind
There are four areas of the mind that must be affected before entering a hyper suggestible state.
- Conscious mind – retains and remembers memories within the past one and a half hours
- Critical area of mind – part conscious and part subconscious. Contains memories of approximately the past 24 hours
- Modern area of memory – part of the subconscious. Contains memories from conception to present
- Primitive area of mind – part of subconscious mind. Includes memories that lie dormant including genetic heritage, evolved learning and conditioning ad only reacts when triggered, regressed or threatened beyond the point of reason. An example would be flight or fight reaction to an extreme situation. Suggestions affecting this are result in fast reaction without reason
A hypnotist uses inductions, various deepening techniques and an overabundance of message units to the conscious mind that it enters escape mode, a sleep like hyper suggestible state. At this time, the critical area of the mind becomes less critical and starts dropping message units and suggestions provided in to the subconscious area without analyzing and evaluating them based on past experiences and conditioning.
Also, suggestions given in the hypnotic state are much stronger than one given in the conscious state because it moves quickly from the critical area to modern memory that it doesn’t have the time to become dilutes. The best part about guided hypnosis is that is a consistent positive reaction to a suggestion takes place that reaction becomes a permanent habit, making will power and motivation unnecessary to make it stick.