Change happens in 4 steps

Hypnosis is mainly used in therapy and with shows, but much less in coaching. And yet it can be very interesting to use. After all, you can make a change happen much faster. The best way then, of course, is conversational hypnosis and waking hypnosis

Conversational hypnosis

If you want to start using hypnosis in coaching it is good to understand the principles of hypnosis. To me, every communication is hypnosis, so then you can't even not use hypnosis.

The point is that the client starts to take the suggestions and explore on his or her own, finding the answers that are already there. The coach helps him or her do this. This can be done slowly, but with hypnosis it can be done a lot faster, because you start asking slightly different questions and pay attention to certain phenomena in the client.

Change happens in 4 steps

Especially in telephone coaching, I use a lot of conversational hypnosis. When you keep the structure of change in your mind you simply follow the steps. First, you want to activate the problem in the client. The client must feel it, otherwise he is already at step 2 ;-)

Step 2 is that the client is dissociated from the problem and thus does not experience the problem. When you do that sequentially, the neural network in the brain is still active dealing with the problem. Step 3 is generating a good feeling and often I tell a quick joke. And then with step 4 you link that good feeling to the problem.

If you have that structure in your head and you follow those steps and you keep an eye on where the client is, suddenly change becomes quite easy.

There are lots of ways to do the steps and a blog post is too short to go all in on them, but when you follow the steps and continuously go down the cycle, change will happen. Guaranteed!

A lot of people mistakenly think that change is a very difficult process. Nothing could be further from the truth. Staying the same is difficult. This is because your brain is constantly changing. The only thing that never changes is the change itself.

It may seem very difficult to change something but you are constantly doing it. Often, however, you make it worse and then it seems like it doesn't change. Yet it does, in fact it gets worse. Of course, that strategy is not really helpful, but it happens. It is better to do it just the other way around. Then change can really happen quite quickly.

For example, I recently had a client on the phone with fear of failure. She was 16 years old and had not been to school for 4 weeks. The conversation went something like this. E is me and K is the client.

E: What exactly is the problem?
K: I have a fear of failure
E: How do you know that?
C: A test showed that.
E: Okay, so now the test knows that, but how do you know it?
K: I can feel it in my stomach; it’s throbbing in my stomach… (Step 1 is complete)

E: Is that true?
K: No, not really
E: So it doesn’t feel right to you?
K: Yes, it does…
E: That’s not true, is it?
K: No...
E: So it’s not true that it feels right there? Is that right?
K: No... (Step 2 is complete)

This went on for a while with more Quantum Hypnosis to the point that she started laughing and we were at step 3. Then I said "If you think about school with this feeling now, what happens next? And step 4 was complete and we started over again with step 1.

After an hour, the change was a reality and she just went back to school that Monday :-) That's how fast change can happen if you follow the steps and it can be done easily on the phone. Especially Quantum Hypnosis is a very good tool then.