At the Hypnosis Institute Netherlands, we see it often, people using hypnosis for meaning in life. We often hear of people in corporate jobs turning their lives around after burnout or because they find that the work just doesn't give them what they need.
And then they come to us.
On that note, you can do better like Farah, a trainer with us, and immediately start your working life with hypnosis.
After all, hypnosis is something. It can help you in all sorts of ways. It helps you interpret your life differently. It helps you recover from burnout. It helps you overcome fears. It helps you overcome health problems.
The experience people have with hypnosis often inspires our trainees to learn how to use hypnosis to help other people. In the process, the training often helps people gain even more insight into themselves and people around them.
Meaning Work
Finding meaning in your work can be done in multiple ways with hypnosis. In fact, a hypnotherapist can help you look at your work in a different way. Making you find it more meaningful.
One exercise you can do right now is to imagine the ways your work helps people. A few examples:
- In the kitchen at fast food: You help people eat delicious food faster when they are hungry.
- As a cleaner: You provide a clean pleasant living environment that prevents people from getting sick from dirt.
- In corporate customer service: You help people resolve irritations and move on with their day more relieved.
That way, you can think of things yourself that help other people with your work. This can make your work feel more meaningful, and that in turn helps you have more motivation for your work.
On the other hand, you can make hypnosis your job. You then become a hypnotherapist and make helping people the meaning of your work. Many of our trainees have chosen that helping people is the way to give meaning to their lives.
Meaningfulness spirituality
In addition, some people use hypnosis precisely in a spiritual way. For example, the state of hypnosis is already very soothing, and self-hypnosis can be used to address personal problems on one's own.
It can be a great way to get enlightened. People often literally feel a lot lighter after a session, too.
In fact, hypnosis can change your perception of yourself, your body and the world around you.
Sometimes people can slip into hypnosis unnoticed by a particular activity, such as while watching a movie, driving a car or exercising[1].
In the process, hypnosis also helps people be happier. If you couple being happy with having a meaningful life with joy and good feelings, hypnosis can play a role.
In fact, hypnosis allows you to focus your attention on certain things and use it to influence your emotions.
In the process, focusing on what is good in life can strengthen connections in the brain to trigger those good feelings. This makes it easier to feel happy.
In the process, you can change emotions about your past, present life and expectations about the future. Of course, this can also be done in a positive way[2].
Making sense of adversity
Adversity in life can feel incredibly unfair. Many people resolve this by looking for what the adversity in life wants to teach you. What is the lesson I can learn from this setback?
At Hypnosis Institute Netherlands, we also teach our trainees to help people with this.
For example, a good exercise might be a gratitude exercise.
For example, if you had a bad childhood, people can change this feeling about it by listing the very things that bad childhood brought them, such as:
- Greater independence.
- Being able to take care of yourself.
- Being Streetwise.
- More self-confidence by knowing you can build on yourself.
This can make you yet more able to view the "meaning" of a bad childhood in a positive way.
Research also shows that having a bad childhood can lead to more negative feelings in your adult life, but that beliefs about control help you suffer less from those negative feelings[3]. So strengthening feelings of self-confidence and self-efficacy helps you to still experience a pleasant life, even if your start was not too good.
Exercises in which you look at the advantage of a disadvantage can work very well to give meaning during periods of adversity. For example, if you lose something or experience something traumatic, giving meaning to the trauma - or even determining the benefit of the trauma - can make you function better a year later, than if you do nothing about it. In particular, determining what benefits something had can ensure that you process the trauma well in the long run[4].
Who knows, it may even lead to post-traumatic growth.
Finding meaning as you age
As you get older, meaning in your life is increasingly important. Research shows that people over 50 who feel they are living a meaningful life (at the time, so it need not have always been that way) have stronger personal relationships, engage in more social activities, suffer less loneliness, thrive more (higher income and well-being), have better physical and mental health, have a stronger upper body, run faster, are less overweight and have healthier biomarkers than 50+ people who do not feel they are living a meaningful life[5].
Fortunately, research shows that if you start working on having a meaningful life, it can still provide all these benefits.
If you don't currently feel that your life has meaning or purpose, there are a number of things you can do to still get this feeling.
Living a meaningful life is often more about giving than taking. Taking something, such as a day off or a fun outing with friends, for example, creates joy. But giving something makes you feel meaningful. Which in itself can also create feelings of happiness.
Also, expressing yourself, and thus being more yourself, creates more feelings of meaning in life[6].
So things that can help you get this feeling include:
- Helping people
- Volunteer
- Personal Development
This is all easier said than done. For example, many people ask "Who is waiting for me?". Well, that may surprise you, but showing yourself and holding out your hands to help someone can be exciting.
With hypnosis, you can remove barriers that prevent you from helping people or daring to be yourself. As a result, you can improve meaning in your life.
Strengthening self-confidence is something that is done a lot with hypnosis and an important part of training at Hypnosis Institute Netherlands. Just going to a hypnosis seminar will teach you little tricks that help you make people feel good about themselves.
There are multiple techniques for this.
Barriers to helping people with knowledge or skills can also be removed with hypnosis. We then often look at a person's beliefs and why a person thinks certain skills or knowledge is not something that can be shared with the world.
For example, if you hobbyistically repair clothes, you can also help other people with this. By finding out why you think people are not interested in doing this, you can do something about that belief.
Don't have such a skill set? Then there are often plenty of places where people are looking for volunteers to provide support. Consider, for example, bringing drinks around nursing homes or organizations that help other people with problems.
Even then, you may still have barriers to trying something, for example. After all, you can always quit again if volunteering disappoints you.
Sometimes showing how illogical a particular thought is is enough to make a belief more positive. In other cases, it involves digging a little deeper. With regression , for example, you can go back to the first moment when a person felt the obstacle. During this moment, often that limiting belief was created. You can then do something in hypnosis with that moment, "fixing" the belief,[7] so that it is no longer an obstacle to helping people or being more yourself, for example.
This allows people to get on with their lives and fill them with meaning.
Learning hypnosis to help people
At Hypnosis Institute Netherlands, we often have trainees who want to improve their knowledge, because they are already psychologists or do other work with people, for example.
And regularly people come to us who have changed course and want to use hypnotherapy to help people.
Want to know if this is something that suits you? Then come to the free online master class.
Or register directly for one of our training courses.
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