How hypnotherapy and EFT/tapping can help you to achieve more in your life

It’s now September, we are nine months into the year and, for many people, this is an excellent time for reflection about the months gone, a reassessment of the months in front of us and what we can do in that time. For some people, though, this sort of reflection creates stress and anxiety. The sorts of thoughts that flood into their mind are things like:” What have I actually achieved this year?” “I’m useless, I haven’t done any of the tasks I set out to do” “I must get these things done before the end of the year or I’m a failure!”

But these kinds of thoughts are not helpful, they don’t fill you with confidence and motivation – quite the opposite in fact. If you tell yourself that you’re already a failure then you will feel like a failure and act like one too!

So what can you do to break out of this unhelpful sort of cycle and use the last part of the year to make the changes you want? How can hypnotherapy and EFT help give you the motivation to change?

The first step is to look at the tasks and goals you set out to achieve. Were you being realistic? Did you break down the tasks into manageable steps or leave yourself with a mountain to climb? Are these goals actually related to your own values and beliefs or did you feel under pressure to adopt someone else’s goals for you?

Then look at what has been holding you back. When you think about the tasks you have set out for yourself, what thoughts come into your mind? Do you find yourself feeling negative and hopeless about your own abilities – which indicates that you need to work to improve your self-belief and self-confidence – or do the tasks feel nebulous and non-specific so that you can’t actually picture them happening?

What can help is to get very specific about what you want to achieve and when. If you want to change your job, don’t just have that as your goal, do some research on what  direction you want to move in (doing the research is a secondary goal that you can plan for), think about, and plan to complete any additional skills development you need (more secondary goals to plan for).

Hypnotherapy and EFT/tapping can help in several ways. Once you have begun to notice those negative thoughts about yourself and your abilities that are holding you back, we can use EFT to help take the emotional sting out of those thoughts, so they no longer have any hold over you. With hypnotherapy we can rehearse new, more helpful thoughts that will help our progress and we use our imagination to really begin to believe in these new and helpful thoughts, establishing a new pathway in our brain.

When it comes to taking action to achieve our goals, hypnotherapy can help us to develop new helpful habits, focussing our imagination on the achievements that we want, seeing each step in detail and visualising ourselves completing them, recognising how we feel once that happens. This is such an effective way of motivating ourselves to begin, seeing ourselves solving problems and achieving success, rather than focussing on the blocks and what could go wrong.

There is some research that has been done in this area recently. For example, research published in 2021 found that hypnotherapy can have a beneficial impact on student’s motivation to learn, making learning more fun and enhancing their memory. In Indonesia, there are sessions for students prior to taking exams to enhance their motivation to do well. But it doesn’t just help with studying, hypnotherapy has been shown to be very effective in helping people change habits, both stopping old and unhelpful habits and establishing new, useful ones.

With clients I see we spend some time discussing when things are going to change. If a client is going to try something new, what day do they plan to do it, what time that day? You can do this for yourself too, so you can put in your calendar, for example, that on Wednesday at 7pm you are going to spend an hour researching training opportunities relevant to your career change.

If you find that you still can’t take any action, that’s a signal to look inside, what are you thinking or believing about yourself? Are there other negative thoughts or beliefs that you need to tackle or do you need to build up your confidence with breaking down the task into smaller, more achievable steps?

There is also plenty of research to show that tapping can help people to remove the blocks that trigger negative emotions. If you find it very hard to aim for promotion at work because you get scared and stressed when you remember the time your old boss shot you down in flames when you dared to ask for promotion, then tapping can help you clear these triggers. Hypnotherapy can help you to really believe in yourself and your own skills and abilities so that you feel able to be brave.

This year, make September the time that you develop a plan for change that you can stick to, become the person you really want to be, living the life that you deserve. Hypnotherapy and EFT can be the tools you need to learn to make this a reality.