“The benefits of reaching your goal are the feelings of your long awaited achievements.” That is what a young woman said to me who came to see me for hypnotherapy two years ago.

She sounded so confident and glowing with personality and success when she spoke those words to me on the telephone.

Two years ago this woman came into my office stooped shoulders having just miscarried her baby and ended a stormy relationship with her boyfriend. She was distraught and wanted to get rid of emotional baggage relating to her feelings of loss. All her life she had pictured herself as living happily ever after, married with children and living in a lovely house. However, real life got in the way of that and here she was having just lost what she so much desired.

Her boyfriend had cheated on her and she felt she needed to learn to rebuild trust in relationships with men, before even considering moving on.

I suggested to this woman she puts herself on high priority for care and attention for the foreseeable future, until she feels fitter and well enough to start exercise and experience more healthy eating. I explained the process of self-hypnosis and how goal setting can really help her to plan, see and experience a positive future, instead of feeling like everything had ended for her life.

You see the woman’s long term goal was to have children and settle down. All this was achievable, but there were little bits in the middle which she needed to deal with first, like looking after herself and eating and exercising more to get over her miscarriage. So, she set about making small goals to start, like deciding how many time per week she would listen to her self-hypnosis CD.

As her self-hypnosis became more of a good habit, she moved on to bigger goals, such as increasing her self motivation. She went back to work and set her mind to doing a job she enjoyed. It took some reaching, with all the job applications, interviews and rejections. However, she did eventually, two months later, get a job as a Sales Manager in a shoe shop.

Some time later, it was there she met her present partner and because she had learned to rebuild trust within relationships; she was able to enjoy her life with him.

So, other goals she set herself were as follows:-

• Exercising twice a week for 20 minutes
• Eating less chocolate and more fruit
• Getting 8 hours sleep per night
• Listening to a self-hypnosis CD 4 times per week

All the above were small enough to be achievable. I did explain to her that it is important each goal is an emotional desire; she really feels she wants to achieve each of them. There was one part during her hypnotherapy, when she felt low with confidence and self-esteem; but the emotional baggage was soon lifted through hypnotherapy and she felt free to move on.

Oh, and why did she telephone me in the first place, to tell me her dream had come true! (Or rather she had achieved her long term goal). She was pregnant to her long term partner and they were both over the moon!

Let me tell you about a client who came to see me recently for hypnotherapy. She had purchased a stop smoking hypnotherapy recording and said it had not worked and she felt upset because she had put lots of effort into listening to it everyday. She was still smoking!

So, after a brief chat about what was also happening in her life, she decided to come along and see me for hypnotherapy and counselling.

It turned out this lady was going through a rather painful divorce, she was very angry and had difficulty expressing her feelings. She felt she could not explain how she really felt and how much anger she experienced inside. When I asked her how she coped with those feelings, her spontaneous answer was, ‘Well, I just smoke!’

We worked together with the built up feelings and emotional past events leading up to her divorce. I suggested she took her time to get over her present situation and perhaps listen to an anger, self-esteem or self-confidence hypnosis CD or MP3 download recording to start, and once she felt better about herself; she could consider stopping smoking.

So, for the first two months or so, the lady practiced self-hypnosis and then, when her divorce was over, she decided to stop smoking and used the stop smoking self-hypnosis recording.

Now, I am not saying everyone needs to see me for hypnotherapy if they have lots happening in their life. What I am saying is, consider all your life when you are about to make changes to yourself – would the new changes be right for you now? How would they affect others in your life? Is there anything else or any other area in your life which would benefit from self-hypnosis first? If you’re not sure, then please do ask, because the team at HypnoShop.com are always happy to guide you with your purchase.

We all have a tendency to move away from unpleasant/undesired behaviour and move towards pleasant experiences. The following “Swish Pattern” technique uses this process to guide you into a new way of thinking, feeling and behaving.

You might pick something like smoking or fear of spiders or you might pick something like being assertive at work or being angry and upset with a friend.

Using this technique, we will guide you through identifying where your problem is and how it got stuck in the first place. We’ll then ask you when or where you would like to behave or respond differently than you do right now?

Secondly, we ask you to identify a ‘cue’ picture of a time when you first started the behaviour. Many people are often on automatic pilot and before they realise they have behaved in the same way, they are in the same situation. For instance, it is probably easy to remember how you feel when you are upset with someone, than to remember the very first thought of when it all started?

So, if it is problems with being assertive, you might remember when it all started and who was there at the time. You might remember what you said (or wanted to say) and then decide other choices of how you could react if it happened again.

Thirdly, we ask you to create a picture of your desired outcome. What is it you want? How do you want to be, react, behave? The better and more intense this is, the better the results.

So, if it was stopping smoking, you could possibly want to see yourself breathing clean and fresh air, feeling healthier and see yourself spending more time with family and friends spending the money you have saved from giving up.     

Now for the ‘Swish!’…. We’ll ask you to get a sense of the first picture; big, loud and clear. Next we will ask you to place a black and white picture, very small in the centre of the first one and simply ‘Swish it’! Making the new way of behaving big, bright and beautiful, repeating this process for around 4 or 5 times until you, feel the difference.

There are many books you can read about the Swish Pattern which is a technique with the mind change patterns of Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP). There are lots of resourceful information sites regarding this process also. However, we feel, to get the best results from the Swish technique, being guided through it by someone else is far easier than reading it on a flat page. Our hypnosis recordings help you to achieve as intense an outcome picture as possible, bringing with it your new feelings and behaviour.

The good thing about experiencing success with self-hypnosis is the joy of knowing you planned it step by step, you took action, you made it happen and you jolly well got there, from your own efforts! Great stuff! Well done!

The great thing about self-hypnosis is that you can teach yourself a constructive way of thinking and feeling to achieve results. It might be you want to pass your driving test, pass an exam or get that job.

Self hypnosis and mind expansion techniques, taught in different ways with each of our self-hypnosis and hypnotherapy recordings, automatically stimulate a great deal of behaviour modification by eliminating or changing areas of weaknesses within our lives. This makes way for results to take place at both an unconscious and conscious level.

You decide what you would like to achieve; take action to change that part of your life; and then, experience the changes.

You might start to behave differently, perhaps in a more positive way. Maybe friends or family may notice something about you or maybe you notice something about you. It may be you unexpectedly deal with a stressful event in a calm way, spontaneously and without realising.

The most important part is that you thank yourself because you did all the doing. It takes effort to make even small changes sometimes in life and the effort is usually the part which includes making a start in the first place. However, once you get through the decision to begin to change and then take the first step – you can change whatever you feel you would like to make your life more comfortable.

So, just notice the changes…. your changes. And when you have achieved your results from listening regularly to your self hypnosis recording, maybe you would like to move on and have a go with a different title.

It’s a bit like maintaining a car; if you keep a check on it, watch the levels, check the water and oil, check the tyres and look after the bodywork – it should get through the service at low cost.

The general presumption is, if you look after it, your mind, body and spirit should be uplifted, healthy and ready to tackle most events in life.

If you just leave your car unattended and just wait for the service due date to arrive, it would be like asking for trouble and the risk of a huge bill to pay for wear and tear would be very probable.

It’s just like that with our mind and body; if we push it too far and just go on and on and on without a rest, eventually, it will be payback time. That might be you collapsing in a heap because you feel exhausted; going to bed because you have a virus or cold; or generally feeling ill a lot more than when you first cared for yourself.

Caring for your own wellbeing and regularly using self-hypnosis is a way of being proactive. If you are the kind of person who waits for things to happen or ignores the signals that you are doing too much, then much of your time, I expect, will be spent reacting to situations which keep arising.

Learning to be proactive helps you to take responsibility for your own health and wellbeing; it puts you back in the drivers seat and much more in control of your own life and future.

When you feel stressed, worked up, tense, anxious it can be a helpful feeling to have. It can help the body to motivate movement to protect itself from the immediate environment and move away from it. Rather like running away from a spider. It will probably both you to have a fear of spiders, but the fact that your body knows how to react to protect itself is good, isn’t it?

However, when the intensity of these emotions is compacted somewhere within you, and the same pattern is repeated time and time again, almost exaggerated – the energy from the tension needs a ‘get out’ if you like, the feelings need to go somewhere.

If you were walking along the roadside and saw a car fast approaching at excessive speed, coming right towards you, it would be normal to suddenly feel stressed. It would stimulate adrenaline and other glands, transfer the blood from your stomach and intestines to your heart, increase your blood pressure and enable you to run away fast to reach a point of safety. Your short lived emergency is now over and your vital organs can return to normal.

However, constant anxiety and stress keeps the body in the same tensed up state all the time. It keeps the body in a state of alertness all the time. So, worry about work, home, habits, and fears etc all lead to this unnatural condition.

Stress is a sickness of the mind and if the mind is sick then it will slowly have a ‘knock on’ effect upon the body. The body will then become sick.

We, at HypnoShop.com, aim to help you make a healthy habit of listening to self-hypnosis recordings to prevent this situation from happening. We want you to prosper and live a happy and healthy life. Listening regularly to a self-hypnosis CD can help your mind and body adapt and take on board the habit of operating at a balanced level, bringing with it a good sense of well being.