Choosing for yourself: trusting your own choices and prioritizing yourself

Choosing for yourself can actually be interpreted in two ways. It can be about putting yourself more first, that is, choosing to spend more time on yourself. In addition, it can be about making choices based on your own considerations and not caring so much about what other people think you should choose.

Making your own choices

Even learning to make choices is not always as easy as it seems. For example, if your parents have always told you what to do, you may find it difficult to choose for yourself because you are used to looking to someone else to make decisions for yourself. This is not very helpful because it can cause you to live a life that is not your own.

Even then, choosing for yourself can ultimately come down to choosing more about what you want to spend your time on, that what you think other people think you should spend your time on.

So choosing for yourself is another way to put yourself first.

Making personal decisions can be life-changing, especially if you decide to follow your heart instead of what you think your partner or parents or other important people around you want of you.

The choices you make are influenced by the beliefs you hold about yourself and how big or small you think you are. In English, this is also referred to as “self-imposed horizons”[1].

Emotions and making your own choices

Surely many choices you make are based on your emotions, and those emotions in turn arise depending on the situation and your judgment of that situation. That judgment in turn depends on your beliefs about how the world works and how you are supposed to function in it.

In addition, making a choice also creates another emotion. Usually you have certain emotions that you expect. For example, when you buy a garment you think it will make you happy, but sometimes you can also have unexpected emotions. Like when the garment doesn't fit when it is finally delivered in the mail. Then you just feel incredibly bummed.

But these are just minor emotions. When it comes, for example, to making social decisions (whether or not to go to a party) or moral decisions (whether or not to quit a job, end a relationship, and so on), emotions such as uncertainty and regret often play a role in the decision you make[2].

For example, if you regret not going to a party before, that can cause you to then go to that party again. While uncertainty can hinder you from going.

Issues that make choosing for yourself more difficult

Sometimes how you process emotions can also be a hindrance. If you have certain brain damage, or even have (been) an addict, it can be difficult for you to make certain decisions that are good for you in the long term, but don't do as much for you in the short term[3].

Traumatic events can also make it harder to choose for yourself. Trauma can cause you to engage in catastrophic thinking (basically, thinking that everything will go wrong) and lead you to develop beliefs that don’t help you move forward. This can even make you insensitive to evidence about what a sensible choice is and prevent you from considering other possibilities[4].

Changing beliefs to make choosing for yourself easier

This is why it’s so important to have self-confidence, to be mentally strong, and to process trauma until you realize it’s just an incident and not a rule about how the world works.

So that you are less likely to regret making certain choices, because you just won't make them, and also dare to make choices that can make you genuinely happy, but where uncertainty gets in the way.

How often does it happen that something passes you by, simply because you feel you just didn't choose it? Afterwards, it often turns out that you chose "no."

So how do you make sure you choose for yourself? Hypnosis can help you make it easier to choose for yourself and to really make that choice because you think it's a good idea and not because someone else thinks so.

For example, a hypnotherapist can help you with regression. With regression, you can go back to the first moment when you genuinely felt, for example, that you needed another person to make a choice or when you chose another person rather than yourself.

Then the therapist helps you do something with that moment. Many such moments are often found in childhood, for example. After all, childhood is the period in your life where you figure out what the rules of life are, how the world works and how you are supposed to behave in it.

You often unconsciously take those rules with you into the rest of your life, and they can hinder you from choosing for yourself.

You then go on to do something with the moment when such a limiting belief arose, to fix the obstacle[5]. For example, empathizing with other people who were there at the time can already do a lot to release the obstacle. Perhaps you saw how one of your parents asked their partner's advice for making the decision that day and thought at the time that it was the way it should be. It really could be anything.

Empathizing with your current knowledge of the world can give you very different ideas about making your decisions, trusting yourself and putting yourself first.

Processing Trauma

Sometimes it's not a difficult thing to determine why you find it hard to choose for yourself. Perhaps making your own choice once led to a traumatic event and you have been afraid to make your own choices ever since. In that case, trauma processing is important so that you dare to trust yourself again.

If this is part of the moment you discover in regression, a trauma from your childhood, then a conversation with your inner child can do a lot to put it behind you, so you can choose to be yourself again.

Perhaps in your youth it was important to choose what your parents wanted as a survival strategy, but now you have a partner who is not like that at all. Only you don't know that because you haven't chosen for yourself yet.

Sometimes choosing for yourself and finding out that your partner just lets you do this can go a long way toward putting such an obstacle behind you. However, that's easier said than done.

So then talking to your inner child can ensure that you can do this. For example, you can tell your inner child that the survival strategy of compliant is no longer necessary. That you are now in a very different situation and that you now have people around you who accept you as you are.

This conversation can already do a lot, so the new people in your life can indeed show you that choosing for yourself is not a bad thing at all. Perhaps it will even be encouraged 😊.

Hypnosis can also help process trauma in other ways, so that that event no longer stands in your way of choosing for yourself.

For example, I also once helped a woman who wanted to lose weight, but with whom it didn't work because being fat was a way for her to avoid (dangerous) men finding her attractive enough to harass her.

Only, most men don't do this, and by now she knew some other ways to protect herself.

Because she was able to process a traumatic event linked to it, she was then able to simply lose weight and choose her health that way.

How cool is that?

So sometimes the problem you think is holding you back from choosing for yourself is not the real problem. With hypnotherapy, you get help to eliminate obvious and unclear causes of problems so that choosing for yourself becomes easier, whether it is to make choices for yourself or simply to put yourself more at 1.

Would you like to learn more about hypnosis and how you can use it for yourself and others? Then join the free online masterclass.

Or sign up for one of our seminars or training courses. You can take the course in a classroom setting or (live) online.

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