“Everything is falling apart! How can coaching and hypnotherapy help me?”
I know what it’s like to look around you and all you see is stormy seas with 10 foot high waves cresting and crashing. You’re in a boat but it feels so small in comparison to the water as it towers above you. The tightness in your chest is so real as all you can think about is how you desperately hope that you can stay afloat and alive through all of this. You can’t see an end to the storm that is raging around you. Scanning the horizon, there’s no blue skies or hint of sunshine. Just the howling winds, stinging rain, angry ocean and dark clouds.
When you are caught up in all of this, it can feel so isolated and hopeless. You have times when you can reassure yourself that life won’t always be like this but that in itself can seem like just fleeting moments amidst the unrelenting tiredness and stress.
The good news is that help is available.
There are figures and methods that can enable you to detect and safely navigate to calmer waters where there’s no rain and the sun is providing wonderful feelings of warmth. A place with a gentle breeze and you can smell the reassuringly slightly salty sea as the air goes about its lazy slow dance across the water. There’s even the soft, melodic sound of birds in the distance interspersed with the occasional plop! from fish catching insects.
Coaching and hypnotherapy can both guide you to a place of confidence, resourcefulness, peace and safety. They can both help you to truly flourish.
One of the ways that they can do this is through supporting you in breaking things down into manageable parts. No one scales Mount Everest, for example, by focusing on the whole mountain. They focus on the portion of the route that they need to complete in the next 5 hours. It’s a tiny portion of the overall task but without successfully completing it, they won’t be able to get anywhere near their goal of reaching the top. So with coaching and hypnotherapy, you will be guided to break the huge and overwhelming stuff you have before you into smaller bits before tackling them one by one.
A trained coach or hypnotherapist can support you in gaining fresh insights into things that you’re experiencing. It’s not just that they are a second pair of eyes who are not affected by any of the things you are dealing with. They have experience, knowledge and skills to identify underlying patterns, help you dig a bit deeper, guide you in overcoming things and assist you in developing your own skills. This is so valuable when everything seems to need addressing, you are in a state of overwhelm, you can’t see the wood for the trees and find you are struggling to get started with any of it.
A key part of both coaching and hypnotherapy is recognising that you already have all the resources that you need within you. This can be a challenging thought when you feel such intense stress accompanied by a sense of hopelessness. The reason that you don’t have access to these resources, however, is because as we all go through life we accumulate a lot of messaging and experience that, essentially, programmes us to think and behave in certain ways. So through coaching and/or hypnotherapy, you can remove the effects of these that are actually limiting or hindering your abilities, progress and success in life. By doing this, you are able to more easily gain access to your innate inner resources and you will naturally feel better able to handle things.
Coaches and hypnotherapists can also assist you by improving your access to external resources. This may be in the form of providing information regarding opportunities to expand your support network as well as about other things relevant to your particular circumstances (e.g. recommended reading to support a particular aspect of your work with them). This can be particularly useful if there are practical aspects to what you’re facing that the coach or hypnotherapist can assist you by signposting.
One of the valuable ways that coaching and hypnotherapy can help you navigate stormy waters is through providing a safe harbour for you to practise skills and exercises you are unfamiliar with. They are there to support and guide you through the sometimes awkward, sometimes challenging phase of practising something new.
In my coaching and hypnotherapy practice, I place high value on setting tasks for clients to keep the momentum and energy going from one session to the next. The tasks I set are always relevant to the work we’ve been doing in the session or will be doing in the next session. I vary the number of tasks given depending on the length of the gap (for example clients who are having a 4 week gap have a greater quantity than clients who are having a 1 or 2 week gap) while making sure that all tasks are appropriate and relevant for where the client is at that point in time. This method of tasking can be helpful for clients who are overwhelmed because it helps to reinforce the idea of breaking things down and focusing on one thing at a time.
My clients all benefit from my specific blend of personal experience, professional experience, and all of my formal and informal learning opportunities. I am an open member of the LGBTQ community, have years of experience navigating polyamorous relationships, have struggled with mental health issues myself as well as experience working and volunteering in psychological/mental health spheres. I have engaged in many formal and informal learning opportunities since graduating from university including my NLP Coach and Hypnosis Practitioner training. I am also a member of the BPS through which I am part of a group of psychologists applying pressure to the government to make the conversion ban apply to the whole of the LGBTQ community. The BPS is one of the organisations that provide me with access to continuing professional development opportunities. All of this has built up my own confidence, knowledge bank and skill set which is used to the benefit of my clients with some of it proving to be useful in the most unexpected moments depending on the client in front of me.
There are many specific ways that coaching and hypnotherapy can help different people in various circumstances. This article has aimed to demonstrate some of the ways that they can be used to help you if you are feeling overwhelmed, hopeless, stressed and constantly tired.
If you are interested to discuss how I can best help you, please do contact me today.
