A big part about seeing a hypnotherapist and/or life coach, is that you share part of your personal story. The more you trust your hypnotherapist/coach and the more you can share, the better your experience will be. However, a professional hypnotherapist shouldn’t share much of their own journey with you at all. Your sessions are about YOU. Today, here on this blog, I will share a little about my journey.
There comes a point in your life where you need to decide what you want to do with your life, it’s called high school. If you are lucky, you have been an adult for a few short months before you leave the safety of public school and enter “the real world”. Maybe you held a job for some of the last four years, perhaps you were involved with sports, maybe you feel in love with a subject in school. Whatever your high school experience was, the truth is you have very little “real world” experience (although teenagers think they know it all, don’t they?) and yet you are expected to decide what you want to do with the rest of your life…. no pressure right?
In high school, I had really enjoyed my psychology and sociology classes. I was always listening to my friend’s problems and everyone told me I should become a therapist. I thought about it but the thought of another six to eight years of school seemed way too much.
I decided to major in my second love, Radio and TV. I enjoyed my courses but becoming a radio personality (which was my dream at the time) seemed like it would be too much work. I now understand that if a dream seems like more work than you are willing to put in, it’s not really your dream. Besides, I wanted to become a mother some day and being a radio personality would make that harder to do.
Well, motherhood came sooner than I had expected. The next few years were spent raising two girls, learning how to be an adult, and living through a less than perfect (shall we say?) first marriage. I started working at a nursing home as a nurse’s aid on the weekends. I really enjoyed helping and caring for my residents but I hated the fact that we had so much charting to do and we were under staffed, that I couldn’t really spend the time with each resident.
As my first marriage was ending and my second (wonderful) marriage was starting, I decided it was time to go back to school. There was a point in my life where I felt like I would never even earn my Associate’s degree. I graduated with a degree in Social Work and started my studies for my Bachelor’s degree in Psychology right away. I knew that one goal I had was a college degree. The degree is more for myself than anything else.
As I finished my studies for my Bachelor’s, I had to figure out what I was doing next. A Bachelor’s in Psychology really doesn’t go far. I was planning to go to grad school, do the hours required under someone and then take the license test and become a marriage/family therapist. I was having serious doubts about this path. I now have four kids and attending grad school has to be done in person, it is time consuming, more student loans, and I am so tired of traditional school. I wasn’t going to let these things prevent me from my goal but something didn’t feel right.
I opened up an email from the community college and saw an exciting new course. Hypnotherapy! I realized that no matter what, I could use hypnotherapy in my practice. I was still thinking grad school and all that but as the six month course continued, I realized I wanted to be done with traditional school (at least for a while). I realized the things I wan to learn now are not college credit classes. There are non credit courses offered at the Community College, classes offered through the church I attend, courses offered through the National Guild of Hypnotists and classes offered through other community venues. These are the courses I really enjoy, the ones that give me the most fulfillment and the ones that I feel help me the most in my personal and professional development.
I started to realize that I needed to reevaluate my path. My destination was pretty close to being the same but the route I was taking needed to change. First, I needed to evaluate why I wanted my path to change. Was it fear? I will not let fear keep me from my dream. I realized my reasons were very valid and real. My family always comes first and I realized that changing my path slightly would also be very beneficial to them. After a solid evaluation, I started to think about life coaching.
I like the idea of coaching but there is very little regulation out there. Finding a program can cost anywhere from a few hundred to thousands of dollars. It was very frustrating. After doing my research, I found two programs that I felt were good for my needs. I decided that I would build my hypnotherapy practice and get my life coaching certificate as soon as possible,
After I completed my hypnotherapy training, I was handed a pile of stuff including information about the National Guild of Hypnotists’ annual convention. There are so many avenues of hypnotherapy I want to learn, but this year is not the year to go. I have a lot of expenses right now in setting up my business. The convention and courses offered (and travel) can get rather costly. Anyway, as I am reading and making a mental note of all the courses I want to attend in the future, I came across a post convention course called “Hypnocoaching”.
Suddenly, my heart was beating faster and I could feel my excitement build. The instructor for this course took exactly what I was picturing to do and made a course out of it! I knew I had to get to this course. So now in the midst of building my practice, I will be traveling five hours away and attending this course. It is hectic, terrifying, a little crazy, but amazingly right…almost perfect.
I think back to high school and how we all had to decide what we were going to do. I could have never predicted this life, not in a million years. I only heard the terms hypnocoaching for the first time a couple of months ago.
There are a few reasons for this personal share. Mostly, I think there is a lot to learn from this.
* First of all, everything does really happen for a reason. It is really hard to understand that reason a lot of the time, and sometimes you can’t really say well this directly caused that. It is the path you take that gets you to where you are. I think back on my path, so many times I could have changed one little event and right now my life would be insanely different. Sometimes life is really hard and you might wonder why you are experiencing what you are experiencing. Just remember that there IS a reason. You are growing everyday and one day, you will be over the hardship and in a better place.
* Second, everything does happen for a reason but sometimes you can save yourself a lot of grief by evaluating your decisions in a more effective manor. I think back to some of the choices I made right out of high school and wonder if I made them for the right reasons or if it was fear. I wish I would have had better insight earlier in life but I don’t dwell on the past. It is what it is, live, learn and do better now.
* Third, sometimes you can’t see your path because you don’t have the knowledge you need to see it. I guess I should also say, things happen at the times they do for a reason as well. The hypnotherapy course that I took wasn’t previously offered around here. If it had been, I probably wouldn’t have been ready for it. Sometimes, you don’t even notice things til it is time. I might have read emails for a few years with this course being offered and might not have even thought about the course any of those times. By realizing a year ago that the thought of grad school wasn’t feeling right, I was opening my mind up to notice other options.
* Fourth, you need to learn to trust your intuition. When something doesn’t feel exactly right, it probably isn’t right. Likewise, when something feels right, trust if and go with it.
* Finally, never allow fear to interfere with your dreams and goals. Whenever we try something new, we get scared. It is okay, it is normal and it can even be healthy to get afraid by the unknown. The thing is, if you allow the fear to prevent you from moving forward, you will always be stuck in the same place. Examine your fear and try to understand it. Some fear is rational and it is good to address those fears, but so much is just unproductive, unhealthy, irrational fears. When you know something feels right and you have evaluated the risk, sometimes you need to just go for it.
One last thought, don’t let thinking about how old you are or will be hold you back. Thinking about going back to school but it will take four years? Well, those four years are going to pass either way. Wouldn’t it be nicer to look back and see how far you have come in those four years? Time will pass no matter what you do, so why not make it productive?
