Are you just a hypnotist? Or do you truly understand how to help yourself and help your clients beyond the hypnotic trance?
Here at Mike Mandel Hypnosis we teach both hypnosis and personal development. If you’re a hypnotist, you already get solid personal development training inside of our online academy. But if you have no interest in becoming a hypnotist, we have a separate course that focuses purely on self improvement including using self hypnosis.
Why do we teach personal development to hypnotists? Here’s a nice short video for you. Then you’ll find some summary thoughts below.
We view hypnosis as an amplifier of human experience. Obviously we want all of our hypnosis students to have solid hypnotic skills. But helping clients goes far beyond these basics!
NLP skills are a good example. Hypnotists need to understand NLP concepts such as rapport, the meta model (for communication), and NLP interventions (such as the phobia cure), which can be used within a hypnotic trance.
Beyond NLP, it’s important to have a solid grounding in thinking and analysis skills. For example, if you’re not familiar with the Pareto Principle (aka the 80/20 rule), it might be hard for you to intuitively point a client towards fixing the most important aspects of their problem. Another key principle is called “incrementalism” - the power of baby steps. Everyone benefits by knowing how to break a problem into smaller steps that seem more manageable.
Personal development also means having a wide variety of knowledge about different problems people face. We’re not doctors, but we deeply care about health, so we can point people towards expert resources on topics such as weight loss. And we can speak about these topics at an expert level despite having no so-called “formal education” in these areas.
Remember, Mike Mandel has been a hypnotist his entire adult life. Chris Thompson was an engineer and stock analyst before starting this training company with Mike. The only reason they can speak in depth about other topics is because they love learning new things!

Hypnotists: Think about hypnosis as a wrapper that goes around all of the wonderful life changing suggestions and advice you can give your clients. What’s inside that wrapper? Do you have sufficient knowledge? Also think about your own life as a demonstration of the awesome changes you can help others achieve. Do you need to work more on yourself?

What’s Next:
Here are 10 awesome book recommendations for hypnotists. Also make sure to checkout our lifetime membership to the Mike Mandel Hypnosis Academy because it includes all of our courses including the Personal Development Academy.