So you know, January 4th was World Hypnotism Day and I always joke when my clients say, “Well why January 4th? What does that mean to me?” I laugh and I say, “Well that's about how long it takes to break your New Year's Resolution!”
January is a busy time for me. People come in for all kinds of reasons. They want to find love, they want to lose weight, they want to stop smoking, they want to take responsibility for themselves or change their life in some way; we usually find that it takes more than a resolution in order for that to happen.
Typically all behaviors, whether we are feeling stuck in something, or we just can't seem to change a habit or break a habit, those behaviors are all driven from some kind of emotion. We think that logic is what runs our life because it is our conscious mind that is analytical and logical and figures things out. But in actuality very seldom does logic make our decisions. Our decisions are driven purely by emotion and we confirm them with logic. You know, I might say, “Wow I really want that dress but $350? I've never spent that kind of money on a dress before, but I really want it.” You think about it and you imagine yourself in it. You find a way to justify that price tag and sooner or later that dress is on your body.
We make all kinds of decisions that way, so what happens with resolutions is that we really want to make those changes, and we think that willpower is gonna do it, but willpower. Science now knows. They're doing a lot of studies around willpower. Some really good books out there - that willpower is affected by how many decisions we have to make during the day. It gets less and less. As we get tired, we kind of use it up during the course of the day. Then the next day maybe it's back again.
For example, weight. Usually when people start out on a diet they do really well in the morning, then afternoon starts coming and then by the time it's getting close to dinner, it's out the window, because we're hungry and because we're out of willpower. I tell people, willpower, let's say you love Donuts okay, and there's this amazing donut shop on your way to work. Willpower will help you take a different route to get to work, so you don't have to go by that donut shop and be tempted. But if you're already in that donut shop, you've already made your choice, willpower is gone, it's out. You're gonna be eating those donuts. So willpower has its place and it's very important but what we have to look at is what's driving the behavior to begin with. That's where hypnosis comes into play, and because behaviors are driven by emotion, and because emotion lives in subconscious mind, all our beliefs, all our emotions, all of our rules about life, that's where they reside.
All of our long-term memories are there, so when we use the process, the tool of hypnosis to go and access those things, we can then get to solutions and resolution to our problems much much quicker. The client can then decide, “Wow now I get it.” I get why I've always done this, or why this is so important to me. Then, they can make the conscious decision; do I want to continue doing that same behavior, or do I want to do things different? When you have that kind of insight, when you have that understanding about what's driving your behavior, the behavior is much easier to change. It still takes work, it's not that magic pill or that magic wand. It takes work, but now you know. I like to tell my clients every situation every person in your life, every event, everything is neutral, it's always neutral. It is not neutral however, once we place judgment on it. It's like a coin and there's two sides, and you get to choose, do you want heads or do you want tails? Do you want to be positive or do you want to be negative about it? Do you want to see it as good or do you want to see it as bad? So, it is our judgment that we place, whether it is on smoking that cigarette or not, or having that piece of candy or that bag of cookies or not, it is about everything. You know, do we go down that same old path or do we choose a new one. Yeah, that new one is always a little bit more challenging, because we're trying to change something that our brain is used to doing and let me tell you, our brains don't like to change. It just needs to be efficient so it's going to keep us doing easy things all the time. It takes effort but hyp
