There is this assumption in society today that you only seek support when everything is falling apart. I have written previously on how coaching and hypnotherapy can help in this instance which you can read here. However, today I would like to discuss the place that coaching and hypnotherapy have in fine-tuning, upgrading or optimising your life when you are stuck in a rut. Things are generally going OK for you but they are not absolutely amazing and, frankly, things could be better. 

You may be able to clearly identify what has you stuck in a rut, what area of life you want to fine-tune, upgrade or optimise. For example, you may be doing brilliantly at work, have great friends, do lots of things that you enjoy, but your relationship is a bit rocky. Or everything is going well apart from you just can’t seem to secure your next promotion. It can feel like the one area that isn’t as you would like it to be is huge. It can sap the joy out of a lot of things or just cast a grey shadow over them. You may hear people saying things to you about counting your blessings, being appreciative for what you do have, practising gratitude and keeping perspective. You may even say these to yourself. 

You may be aware of what psychologists call negativity bias. This explains that, as an evolutionary advantage, our brains give more weight to dangerous and other negative stimuli, incidents and situations than positive ones. This weighting means that not only do we pay more attention to the negative things in the moment but we also revisit them more than positive ones after the fact and learn more from them as well. This makes sense when your life literally hangs in the balance. It is less helpful when the negative things are snide comments at work or a rather doom-filled news bulletin. Either way, it’s natural to find yourself focusing on the one part of your life that isn’t as you want it to be. And coaching or hypnotherapy can help you to fine-tune, upgrade or optimise it.

It is also perfectly possible that you can’t quite pinpoint what could be better but you are left sitting with a feeling of dissatisfaction, frustration or restlessness. If this is where you’re at, that’s OK and coaching can absolutely help you work this stuff out. You are human and you are not expected to have all the answers all of the time. Sometimes you may just need someone to ask you the right questions that get you to look at things in a different way in order to work out what isn’t quite right for you. Otherwise, your coach may need to listen closely to the words and watch out for changes in the non verbals you are using or displaying when talking about different parts of your life and how you feel about them. It is highly likely that your coach will be doing all of this at the same time, to be perfectly honest. 

So once you have identified what you would like to optimise, upgrade, fine-tune or improve, coaching and hypnotherapy both offer ways to address this. There’s always going to be a bit of talking around the thing you’ve identified to establish what the core of it is. The core gives your coach or hypnotherapist more insight into what you’re experiencing and how best to approach it. In short, it gives them more understanding of what you’re both working with. This is important because we all have our own shorthand and our own meaning that we assign to things so where one person may say X and mean Y, another may say X and mean B. 

With insight and understanding of what is going on and how to best approach it, your coach or hypnotherapist can then start introducing the specifics of and preparation for any techniques or tools. Quite often there will be a certain amount of information that you need to process before the actual change work starts. Especially if they use psychology, NLP or hypnosis as a basis for the work you will do together. The purpose of this is to help you understand, implement and benefit from the change work. If you don’t understand what is being asked of you or why, it becomes a lot harder to do it and then that, in turn, makes it significantly more difficult to benefit from. So, change work is not typically gone into cold. 

As each person is different, so is the change work that is required. Sure, the techniques may be the same. But the things being worked with are different. Some coaches and hypnotherapists are one-trick ponies and then there are people like me who can use a whole range of tools and techniques to help and support our clients which makes it even harder to give a generalised snippet of what is involved with the change work. The actual change work is the most rewarding bit for me as a coach and hypnotherapist. Or maybe more accurately, the moment after completing a piece of change work is the more rewarding. This is the part where I can see and hear the changes in my clients. And they can feel it too. Sometimes people don’t know how to react. Sometimes I see them trying to reach for the old feeling, belief or thought but can’t quite grasp it. Sometimes there’s just a slight change in their voice as they can tell something has changed but they need some time before they can be sure that it’s really happened, that it’s really worked. Whatever it is, it’s there and it is very real.

Once you are satisfied that the change work has been completed, that you have optimised or upgraded that part of your life and you are out of that rut, we can move to a flexible arrangement where you can get in touch at any point in the future for another session or we can go our separate ways. Either way, you have my details and can change your mind at a later date. 

If you are looking for help to get you out of a rut and are now thinking that coaching or hypnotherapy could be worth a go, then you will be looking at a shorter run of sessions compared to someone who has lots going on. This is because of the more limited amount of change work required. Also you may be looking for larger gaps in between your sessions if you are just looking to optimise, upgrade, fine-tune or improve one part of life. This is all good with me and I do operate with a fair degree of flexibility in terms of regularity of sessions as well as having a reasonable rate. You can check out more info on working with me here.