Question:
Hello, I am about three months away from taking my diploma exam and I have found that, where I was once in a position of confidence with my skills and optimistic about my college/course and hypnotherapy in general, the further along I have come the less confident I feel and the more I know I don’t know! (if you get my drift!) I worry that as a ‘new’ practitioner out there - I just won’t serve my clients well.
I wonder if some of you who are so much more experienced and at ease than I am ever felt the same way and if you did, how you dealt with the self-doubt.
My answer and the excerpt:
This dilemma is a really great gift to you. It gives you the opportunity to resolve some very common issues that your client’s will have first hand. This will give you some genuine empathy for them, and, sensing that, they will be very receptive to your guidance. If you relate to it as a learning experience, it will be a real Godsend!
First: disconnect your Self-esteem from your estimation of your competency.
Second: Never put your Self-esteem at the mercy of your evaluated competency.
Third: Practice having absolute Self-esteem — you are a human being like the rest of us and have a right to exist and contemplate the human dilemma with the rest of us. You are entitled to learn from every life experience without giving yourself belittling fearful suggestions and without accepting belittling fearful suggestions from any quarter.
Fourth: If you find you are not competent enough to serve your clients (you will learn that from their feedback - no need to criticize yourself), cheerfully note the areas where you are lacking and get more training. No need to feel bad about yourself. No need to entertain fearful thinking.
Fifth: If studying and practicing until you do have the needed competency prove unattractive to you, you can cheerfully assume this is not the profession for you and begin a new exploration to find your true passion — no harm, no foul, no shame.
I recently had a psychiatrist take my hypnotherapy training. He shared that in the course of the doctoral phase of his work he stopped dreaming, lost weight and became extremely anxiety ridden. And he had been in practice with clients for years since then, still anxiety ridden and unable to recapture his dream life. I feel outrage and sadness when I hear about toxic environments masquerading as learning environments. Granted it could happen that a person could make a learning environment into a toxic environment by what they make of it in their own mind. In this particular case, it was some of both at the very least.
Let’s make sure you don’t make the same mistake with yours. Find some help from a good hypnotherapist near you. I work with people all over the world by phone with excellent results if you would like to work with me.
When you are ready, I hope you will study with me. I have on-site and distance learning options.
I am including here an excerpt from my book, Finding True Magic, on creating and maintaining a practice.
Creating and Nurturing a Dynamic Practice
It is very important to start with the right view, the right appreciation of context, and the right perspective when approaching the business of therapy.
As has been emphasized in this book relative to therapy, there is a unifying ground to the work that must be recognized and kept in awareness. An important sameness, the egoic process, underlies and pervades all problematic states. This same egoic process stands ready to infiltrate your mental equilibrium when your focus turns to livelihood. It is fine to have subpersonality departments that run different areas of your life, as long as they are fluid and transparent, integrated, light, and joyful.
When it comes to livelihood, that is, survival issues, it is very easy for rigid, fear-based, egoic thinking to take over. If there are hard-line divisions between parts-the therapy part and the business part-a Jekyll-and-Hyde personality shift can arise. The hard-line and contradictions can go largely unnoticed by the therapist, due to our capacity to negatively hallucinate shadow parts.
It is important always to remember that the underlying principles we rely on in therapy-the most basic and root reliance being an ever-expanding connection to the inherently pure guidance of Self/Source-apply in everyday life, to us as well as to our clients, even when it comes to money.
As Dave Elman would say to a resistant client, “Some people are willing to do it the easy way, and some people want to do it the hard way.”
The hard way is fear-based and survival driven/self reliant. The self here is the fragmented, trance state self, the doer, who thinks “I have to do it right, work hard (i.e.,contracted, no joy or lightness, no trust or faith), make a competitive effort. It’s all very well to open to inner guidance in hypnosis to work on emotional issues, but this is money we’re talking about, and its every man for himself!” The hard way includes pride in doing and “helping” (also fear-based). Don’t ever give something to a client; he must give it to himself. Can you let go of your accomplishments? Can you be invisible? Moreover, can you accept dishonor?
If we you honest with yourself , you will notice this egoic urge coming up on a daily basis, every moment. Don’t get moralistic about it, as in, “I shouldn’t be thinking/feeling this.” That just buys into the egoic trip and you go into denial, thus coming under the complete control of that which you are denying: that you could have fear-based, money-grubbing thoughts. Let egoic minding be; be nice to it; tickle it; display it humorously; let it arise and fall. Don’t act or react in relationship to it; instead, focus on the higher/deeper intent and open to that guidance. Consider this an essential expression of generosity to yourself.
This will help you stay tuned to the easy way.
The easy way is the way of faith, the way of unwavering greater vision, even when brushing your teeth or washing your face. In the easy way, you always take the first step first, the right step first, the beginner’s mind step first. It is the way of remembering the source of formlessness, purity, and timelessness, before entering into endeavors in the world of form and time. To accomplish this, it is necessary to understand how each moment is its own first step, how the formless pervades each moment of form; this makes guidance and support abundantly ever present. This is a description of humility, as opposed to the pride and fear of the Doer.- Do you recognize it? Are you willing to cultivate it?
Going the easy way, there is no competition, therefore no grievance. There is no other because your relationship is with the flow of interdependence with the universe, your synchronicity factor; not with the world of others, the world of hope and fear, as constructed by the egoic mind of time and poverty. Therapy, business, housework, shopping: everything is inside the circle of sacredness. Everything counts and is touched by the power and law of this sacredness. When we deny it, we create and give in to the power and law of the world, which is the egoic mind trance.
The mark of this easy way is not merely thinking about virtuous ways. The mark is the effort to cultivate a felt sense of light-heartedness, humility, cheerfulness, and the capacity to feel deeply without shame, judgment, or avoidance.
Comparing is the root of fear. –Upanishads
To compare, you need an other. Maintain the transparency of what seems to be other in the world. Reflect on the Warrior’s qualities of clear-thinking and discrimination. Humility (not humiliation) is the foundation of these qualities. Cultivate them continually, so you achieve a habitual mode of self-correction, wake-up calls, and deep releasing breaths as you think about details of action.
There are nuts-and-bolts details of action to be performed. While you’re doing them, your inner state and view make all the difference in the world. When you open to inner guidance and let a Higher Power take over, it doesn’t mean you don’t do anything. It means you do the common-sense things without getting caught by hope and fear, praise and blame, good and bad, gain and loss; because none of those standards are your standards. They are fearful egoic standards. Your standard is to honor, impeccably, the sacredness of life through right action. You must find out what that means in an ever new and expanding way, moment-by-moment, forever.
Your work is not a survival issue anymore; survival is a matter of faith. Your work, like everything else, is a way of celebrating and honoring life, fearlessly.
With this view, let us examine some of the common-sense, nuts-and-bolts tips about starting and sustaining a business.
1. You need to know who you are.
a. Recognize your areas of interest and your strengths.
b. Create a succinct, conversational presentation, in 25 words or less, describing your work. That way when you meet people and they ask what you do, you won’t find yourself saying, “Uhhhh….” Unless you want to.
2. People need to know you exist.
a. Who are you?
b. What service do you offer?
c. Why do people need it?
d. Where are you?
3. Advertise. (However, keep in mind there are people who make six figure incomes on referrals alone. Maybe not at first.)
a. Target your clientele.
b. Utilize advertising that will reach your targeted clientele. Alternate news media or the food co-op newsletter, for example, might be most the most useful publications. If business people are your clientele, target local business news periodicals. Web presence is essential.
c. Find as many forms of free advertising as you can.
i. Give free talks at service organizations.
ii. Radio or TV talk shows.
iii. Calendar listings are often free.
iv. Press releases.
v. Networks and support groups.
d. Telephone book yellow pages.
e. Flyers, brochures, and business cards.
f. Put yourself in circulation. Go to meetings where your work may be of interest and benefit.
g. Write articles for local periodicals.
h. Bulk mail.
i. Teach seminars and classes.
j. Host a booth at appropriate fairs. Share information, do demonstrations, offer free sessions through a drawing. (A note about drawings: set a time limit on the prize. The point is to get people to act. Of course, all the losers are interested people who now are part of your mailing list.)
4) What to charge?
a. You must do your own soul-searching about this. It is important that you can ask for compensation without hesitation or shame. The egoic mind can act this out convincingly, but there will be a contraction within it, no matter how well disguised. Your approach should be more genuine. This will necessitate not merely deciding on a figure, but getting a clear, comprehensive grip on your relationship with money and time.
b. Don’t treat advertising like rent; treat it like an investment. Rent is something you pay because you need a place to live; you don’t examine your return on the money spent. But with an investment, if it’s not giving you more than you put into it, you try something else. When you advertise, you have to be patient in an appropriate way and give it a chance, just like an investment. Give anything you try at least six months, perhaps a year.
c. Here are some money books to enrich your thinking. There are host of web-marketing books as well.
i. Guerilla Marketing, Levinson
ii. The Unabashed Self Promoter, Phil Laut
iii. Money Is My Friend, Phil Laut
iv. Marketing Without Advertising, Michael Phillips and Sally Raspberry
v. Seven Laws of Money, Michael Phillips and Sally Raspberry
5. Establish a daily habit of meditation; do it for the sake of all beings if you must have a goal. Meditate as an expression of faith, opening, humility, and gratitude, even if you don’t think or feel these things. It doesn’t matter what you think. Just meditate with this inner conviction no matter what you think or feel.
6. Become a mentor; ask someone to mentor you. This a form of self-nurturing and guidance. It will help you with your skills. It will help you avoid the trap of becoming the dried-up kind of therapist who helps others as a way of avoiding his own problems. We all have blind spots, and we can forget the perspective and struggle of the client to trust, to become vulnerable, to open. This practice will help your cultivation of humility. I personally am available for graduates in either capacity, on an individual or group basis, and I refer clients to those so engaged.
7. Go For It!
Until one is committed
There is always hesitancy, the chance to draw back,
Always ineffectiveness.
Concerning all acts of initiative and creation
There is one elementary Truth, the ignorance of which, kills countless ideas and splendid plans;
That the moment one definitely commits oneself,
Then Providence moves, too.
All sorts of things occur to help one that would otherwise not have occurred.
A whole stream of events issues from the decision
Raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance which
No man could have dreamed would have come his way.
– Excerpted from The Scottish Himalayan Expedition, by W.H. Murray
Whatever you do, or dream you can do, do it.
Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.
Begin it now.
– Goethe
You may know of Goethe as one of the great writers of all time, but you may not realize he was an initiated adept of esoteric spiritual teachings. Take what he says, and Murray’s eloquent understanding of the same principles, as the words of a Magician who realized in his own life the faith and synchronicity of which he speaks.
Goethe states a technical dynamic of the phenomenal world, which arises out of a deep thoughtfulness. The point of this book is to help you cultivate-for clients and for yourself-thoughtfulness, heartfulness, soulfulness; not mere technical competency. When you have it, cars going by, birds cooing, or the commotion of others won’t be distracting. From what can they distract you? From your experience of being sacredly, gratefully, alive…moment-by-moment…now!)
©Copyright Jack Elias, 2006, All Rights Reserved. Excerpt from Finding True Magic: Transpersonal Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy/NLP by Jack Elias.
Jack Elias, a Clinical Hypnotherapist in private practice, is founder and director of The Institute for Therapeutic Learning, a licensed Vocational School in Seattle that trains and certifies Transpersonal Clinical Hypnotherapists. Jack presents a unique synthesis of Eastern and Western perspectives on the nature of consciousness and communication, teaching simple yet powerful techniques for achieving one’s highest personal and professional goals. Since 1967, Jack has studied Eastern meditation, philosophy and psychology with masters such as Shunryo Suzuki Roshi and Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. Before beginning his teaching and counseling career, Jack worked for 20 years in sales, marketing and financial planning. Jack offers dynamic experiential workshops and seminars, and his Finding True Magic courses are eligible for credit at various universities.
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