Do you want your clients to rave about the results you got them?
As hypnotists and therapists, self-esteem is among the most important things we should seek to improve in our clients. That’s because we all grow up being affected by other people’s opinions, especially labels that authority figures in our childhood put on us.
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The Imprint Phase of Life Affects Self Esteem
During the first 7 years of life, we’re significantly vulnerable to people we hold in authority positions. Those would be our parents and caretakers, most of all. But also older siblings, teachers, etc. This vulnerability takes on many forms, one of which is the tendency we have during that age to accept everything they tell us as the absolute truth.
As small children’s critical faculties aren’t yet fully developed, they’re very sensitive to affirmations and suggestions made by pretty much any adult, positive and negative. These suggestions, as we mentioned, often come in the form of labels we learn to accept as they’re repeated to us.
Take, for example, a parent who says things like these to their child:
“You’re such a dummy”
“You’re so lazy”
Or even something as seemingly innocent as
My little pork chop”.
These things can be said affectionately and without any intention to cause harm, but they could be putting a horrendous imprint on the adult they’re raising their child to be. The same goes for teachers who, without any concern for the child they’ve been entrusted to educate, say things like “you’re stupid” and “you’ll never be anything in life”.
The thing is: a child’s brain functionalities aren’t well developed enough to discard these comments as irrelevant. They’ll take them on as fact and potentially carry around, like baggage, for the rest of their lives. If you deal with children in your profession or at home, this is something you must understand.
Ego Strengthening With Direct Suggestion
Because so many people assume hurtful comments given to them during childhood as part of their identity, it’s very useful to give empowering and ego-strengthening suggestions at the end of every hypnosis session.
This can be done very simply with direct suggestions. Whether on stage or in the clinic, before you wrap up and bring them out of trance, simply give two or three very positive ego strengthening suggestions.
Saying something like “you’re becoming a more powerful person all the time. You’ve left so much behind because you are a winner. You’re someone who succeeds.” may seem trivial, but because, in hypnosis, we’re bypassing the critical faculty of the client. This gives us a chance to overwrite the old beliefs that may have been written during childhood. We’re offering clients a new perspective of self that will really give their self-esteem a powerful boost.
As with any direct suggestion work, make sure your suggestions are:
- Positive. Whatever the new label or behavior you’re placing on them, make sure it’s something good.
- Simple. It’s useful to repeat what you’ve said a few times in different ways. That means phrasing it differently to reinforce what you’ve just said. Also, focus on the present or future tense, making them empowered in the present or leading into the future.
- Reasonable. Your suggestions must remain within the line of reason, or else the unconscious mind will simply reject them. Saying “you’re getting smarter every day”, for example, is a lot better than saying “you’re smarter than Albert Einstein.”
A Full Session for Boosting Self Esteem Session in Hypnotherapy
So far, we’ve talked about ego-strengthening suggestions you should give your subjects by default at the end of every hypnosis process. But what if someone comes to see you specifically to improve self-esteem?
Whatever the technique you choose to use, the basic structure will consist of detaching the old labels they used to have from their personal identity and throwing those away. What follows is you must build strong new resources through direct suggestions and other means.
Among the things you can do, a cleanup of the past is among the best picks. Regression therapy is where we focus specifically on getting rid of negative emotions from the past and use future pacing to design a better life with newly acquired resources and self-esteem. To read our full blog post about age regression with hypnosis, click here
Another awesome way to build an empowering personality is through empowering questions. Learn how to help your clients craft their own empowering questions! This one is more a part of the long-term work we do to improve our self-esteem, but it’s very much worth teaching our clients about it nonetheless. To read our full blog post on empowering questions, click here.
We just showed you a couple of options, but the list of powerful techniques to build amazing self-esteem is nearly endless. A sizable amount of them belongs to neurolinguistic programming or NLP, possibly the most amazing approach to personal growth and communication to have ever been developed.
If you wish to learn the essentials of NLP for application in a therapy room or in everyday life, you should definitely check out our NLP Essentials course. In just 5 hours of densely packed video lessons, we’ll teach you the most important aspects of NLP and give you an awesome set of tools you can immediately use.
And if hypnosis is your gig, you’re also in luck. The Mike Mandel Hypnosis Academy (MMHA) is as close to a perfect online hypnosis training as it gets. In our core 24 lessons, we’ll teach you all the important things you need to know in order to be a skilled and successful hypnotist. If you’re already an experienced hypnotist or even if you’re just starting out and know close to nothing about hypnosis, MMHA is the program for you..
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