Imagine having a simple, easy-to use tool that can let you change almost anything you want.
A tool that will let you find solutions to problems and get rid of outdated beliefs.
One that will enable you to achieve any goal or finally break those bad habits.
Or maybe you’d like to increase your confidence, boost your self-esteem or find the motivation to exercise regularly.
If that sounds like you, then you need to try self-hypnosis for personal growth.
It’s hypnosis, but rather than having someone else hypnotize you, you can hypnotize yourself.
Which means tapping into your unconscious mind, the source of all your imagination, creativity, memories, emotions and experiences.
The unconscious has been described as a reservoir of thoughts and feelings existing outside of your conscious awareness.
Every event, encounter and incident you’ve ever had is stored in there, and once you connect with it you can have access to all that information.
And that gives you the power to make significant changes to practically any aspect of your life you choose.
Self-hypnosis for personal growth is quite literally the ideal tool for self-improvement, personal development and achieving goals.
But what kind of goals might that include?
Setting Personal Growth Goals
Personal growth goals might include things like:
- Avoiding procrastination
- Taking better care of your physical & mental health
- Boosting your confidence
- Breaking a bad habit
- Increasing your patience & tolerance
- Lowering your stress levels
- Learning something new
Any area of your life that you would like to improve or add to can be classified as a growth goal. The important thing to remember about goals is that they have to be clear and they have to be specific.
For example, suppose you want to spend more time exercising. That’s a fine ambition to have, but it isn’t a goal.
The goal might be losing weight or getting into better shape. But even so, that’s not specific enough.
There’s not enough clear information for you to be able to act on the goal or to know when you’ve achieved it.
One way to get started is by making a simple action plan, which should include the following points:
- Tackle one goal at a time
- Make it as specific as possible
- Create a detailed, step-by-step timeline with deadlines to meet
- Track your progress by keeping a log or journal
- Reward every small success
- Never give up
It goes without saying that your goal has to be realistic and achievable, or else all your hard work will be for nothing. You also need to ensure that your goals are in sync with your values and passions.
Aligning Goals With Values & Passions For Meaningful Growth
Values are the things you believe in, while passions can be described as the things that excite or drive you.
It’s been said that, unless your goals reflect your values and/or your passions, they will be difficult if not impossible to achieve.
To find out if they do, you can begin by asking yourself a few questions such as:
- How do you spend your time and energy?
- What are you passionate about?
- What would you like more of?
- What can you possibly do without?
- What things are missing from your life?
And once you’ve discovered which goals you want to pursue, the next step is to find out what’s stopping you from attaining them.
Overcoming Limiting Beliefs That Hinder Personal Growth
Before finding out how to overcome them, it makes sense to discover more about what limiting beliefs actually are.
As Tony Robbins puts it, limiting beliefs are the ideas you hold about yourself that prevent you from reaching your full potential.
They’re the notions that run through your mind when you find yourself thinking things like this:
“I’m not good enough.”
“I’m not very talented.”
“I don’t have enough patience.”
“There’s always someone better than me.”
“I’m too scared to take a risk.”
“I’m not very creative.”
“I’ll never be successful.”
In many cases these beliefs are the result of your own experience, of times when perhaps things went wrong. Often they’re caused by your upbringing, by what your parents and other adults told you.
The first step in conquering these limiting beliefs is to recognize them for what they are. Once you’ve done that, you need a technique to help get rid of them.
Using Self-Hypnosis To Reframe & Reprogram Limiting Beliefs
One of Thomas Edison’s most famous quotes goes like this:
“I haven’t failed, I’ve just found 10,000 ways that don’t work.”
In other words, what someone else might call failure, Edison calls a learning experience. He took his so-called failures and turned them into something more valuable.
He “reframed” the experiences so they provided him with feedback and showed him what not to do next time.
That’s what reframing means. It helps you look at a situation or belief from a different perspective so you can use it to your advantage.
Self-hypnosis is the perfect tool for this job because it lets you communicate with your unconscious mind.
It literally makes it possible for you to reprogram the way you think, so that negatives become positives and obstacles become possibilities.
For example, one of the biggest stumbling blocks associated with limiting beliefs is negative self-talk. That’s when you keep telling yourself that you can’t do something, that you’re not good enough or that you’ll never succeed.
It’s obviously going to be impossible to reach your goals if you think like that. Instead, you might try to remember a time when success came easy to you.
If it could happen in the past, there’s no reason why it can’t happen in the present.
What was it about that past experience that resulted in you winning? What did it feel like? See if you can recall the experience clearly, with the emotions you felt at the time.
Then bring that emotion forward into the present and know that you have the power to do it all again.
You’ve probably heard or read the story about The Little Engine That Could. Despite the fact that its load was excessive, it managed to pull it up over the mountain against all the odds by telling itself:
“I think I can, I think I can.”
The engine used this simple mantra to change its negative thinking patterns into positive ones. Or to put it another way, to reprogram the way it was thinking.
At the same time, the words helped to boost the little engine’s confidence levels and belief in itself.
People have been using positive affirmations to achieve similar successes for hundreds of years, including certain famous female tennis stars.
You may have seen them between games as they sat in their chairs, referring to notes on pieces of paper and reciting the words to themselves.
It’s a simple way to think positive thoughts, to stay focused on what needs to be done and to take the steps needed to reach your goals.
But what other specific self-hypnosis techniques could you use to do the same thing?
Self-Hypnosis For Personal Growth & Development
Whatever goal you want to achieve, there are self-hypnosis techniques that will help you get there. Here are 6 examples that you might consider using.
Mental Rehearsal – this refers to rehearsing something in your mind that you want to make happen. It could be something you want to achieve, such as winning a competition or getting a job promotion.
The trick is to see yourself getting the position or accepting the trophy, helping to instill confidence in your mind.
It could be something more inspirational, where you tell yourself the goal you want to achieve and let your unconscious mind work to bring it about.
Physical Rehearsal – this refers to rehearsing a skill in your mind that you want to improve at, whether that’s painting a picture, ice skating, juggling, giving a speech or anything else you can think of.
When you “practice” the skill in your mind, going through all the physical motions, it impacts your muscle memory and helps you learn the skill much faster.
Emotional Resourcing – this refers to the emotions you need in order to be able to acquire what you want to have. You can do this in two different ways.
First, start with the end state you want, which might be to be happy. If you’re happy now, then whatever it is you want will only serve to make you happier.
Second, instead of worrying about the outcome, try to enjoy each step along the way, knowing that you’ll get to your goal faster and with a more positive mindset than you might otherwise.
Transformations – this refers to thinking about a person that represents the ideal of the goal you hope to achieve. If your goal is to boost your creativity, for example, you might think of someone like Leonardo da Vinci. As this figure takes you through what you expect them to take you through, you resolve something inside yourself and are transformed.
Automatons – this refers to things that operate by themselves. The idea is to imagine your goal with so much intensity and clarity that the goal takes on a life of its own. And thanks to the power of your unconscious mind, your goal seems to work without you having to pay conscious attention to it.
Talisman – a talisman is a symbol, and in this case one that means a lot to you and is totally enjoyable for you to think about. The more you dwell on it, the more it leads you closer to your desired outcome.
Incorporating Self-Hypnosis Into Your Daily Routine For Continued Growth
Whatever you want to change in your life, it will be so much easier if you turn it into a goal. If you want to stop chewing your fingernails, for example, your goal would be breaking that bad habit.
Here is a simple step-by-step guide on how to set goals using self-hypnosis.
A Guide To Setting Goals With Self-Hypnosis
- Write your goal down on paper – remember to make it clear and specific. For example: “I want to stop biting my fingernails.”
- Stimulate your unconscious mind – state how you will feel when you have reached your goal. For example: “When I stop biting my nails my hands will be healthier and look fantastic and I will feel (happy, proud, successful, etc.).”
- Set a small but achievable mini-goal – the idea here is to do something easily manageable that helps you move closer to your goal. For example: “I will focus on keeping my hands away from my mouth.”
- Work through a self-hypnosis session once you have completed steps 1-3 above.
- Carry out the mini-goal in step 3.
- Repeat these steps until you reach your goal.
Remember that self-hypnosis is something you can do by yourself whenever you have a few minutes of spare time and an available space. You can learn how to hypnotize yourself by checking out this step-by-step self-hypnosis article and infographic:
How To Hypnotize Yourself: Discover The Easy 6-Step Self Hypnosis Formula
Conclusion
Self-hypnosis is the perfect tool for personal growth or self-development.
It lets you communicate with your unconscious so that you can literally reprogram your mind and change the way you think.
This is the reason why self-hypnosis is so effective at helping you achieve your goals.
It’s also important to make sure that your goals align with your values and passions, which you can do by considering a few crucial questions.
In order to realize your goals, it’s often necessary to overcome certain limiting beliefs, the ideas you have about yourself that prevent you from moving forward.
Negative self-talk is a perfect example, where you tell yourself you can’t do something or you aren’t good enough.
Using self-hypnosis, you can reframe those thoughts so that negatives become positives and obstacles become possibilities.
Other techniques that will help you achieve similar results include mental and physical rehearsal, talisman, automatons, transformations and emotional resourcing.
Reaching your goals is easier when you write them down in a clear and specific way, and when you take small but positive steps to ensure they reach fruition.
The link below will take you to a useful breathing tool that will help you get in the right frame of mind to practice hypnosis: