As you are reading this article, it is quite likely that you are looking to train to be a hypnotherapist, or perhaps you wish to add hypnotherapy to your current skills.
Whatever the reasons, you have probably already discovered that there is a myriad of courses, types of hypnotherapy, qualifications, schools, professional associations and governing bodies.
Sometimes experienced hypnotherapists still get confused, even when they have been in the thick of the profession in the UK for many years.
We will explain in our How to Become a Hypnotherapist Book. We’ll help you understand the profession and help you navigate your way to becoming a successful, well-trained hypnotherapist, capable of meeting the needs of the people that seek out your help in making the changes they need to make to improve their lives.
The confusing state of the profession can sometimes put people off entering into the profession, or worse still, they sign up with a school only to finish feeling inadequately equipped to treat the type of people and problems they wanted to resolve.
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Why do you want to be a hypnotherapist?
- Is it for the money?
- Is it to help people improve their lives?
- Is it to give something back to the community?
- Is it to gain respect and authority?
- Is it to have a better work-life balance?
- Is it to have a more interesting working life?
Before you train to be a hypnotherapist, you need to be clear why you want to be a hypnotherapist. What are you hoping to achieve?
All successful hypnotherapists tend to share similar values when it comes to their reasons for being a hypnotherapist. And, although they may have answered yes to all the above questions, the common factor that virtually all hypnotherapists share is that they want to ‘help people to make changes in their lives’. It is this desire that shines through.
What are the qualities of a successful hypnotherapist?
We believe that if your primary aim is to ‘help your clients’, your intention comes through at every contact that you have, from the first telephone conversation with the potential client, which helps secure that person as a client, right through to whilst you’re working with the client to help them make the changes they want to make. To the client, this gives them the impression that you are holding them in the highest possible regard.
This builds a bond and a desire for the client to make the changes because they feel that you, the hypnotherapist, are on their side giving them the help, knowledge and experience they need to achieve their desired goal.
What qualities make a good hypnotherapist?
We believe that the first thing you need is a ‘passion for the work’. By that we mean you need a strong desire to help people too, not only make specific changes, but also to improve their lives across the board. Helping them to build their confidence and discover how to deal with the challenges that life presents to us all.
Life experience
We believe that life experience is important (although it’s not a deal breaker). Having a wide range of life experiences (a degree from the University of Life) is very valuable when working with people. It helps if you are able to understand where they are coming from and you can perhaps relate their circumstances to similar ones you have gone through, or perhaps seen others go through. It could help you to find solutions to their problems in ways that perhaps they had never thought of.
Analytical mind
Having a questioning and logical mind can also be very helpful. Every client that you see will present a problem in their life. Your job is to understand the cause of that problem, which may be a mental health issue, a behavioural problem or simply an absence of problem solving skills.
The exciting part of being a hypnotherapist is solving this puzzle. This is where many hypnotherapy schools fall down. They focus their training on teaching prospective hypnotherapists tricks and techniques, where in reality what is needed is the skill to recognise, analyse and challenge the puzzle that is causing the underlying issues that support the problem.
When the puzzle is solved in your mind, resolving the problem for the client becomes a lot easier.
It is important to understand that having an analytical mind is just a skill and skills can be taught. An important factor in any hypnotherapy training course is to ensure that they train you to think like a therapist.
Sales technique
When we say sales techniques a lot of people run for the hills. However, we are not suggesting that you need to be a sales person with an innate sales skill.
What you need to be able to do is to deliver suggestions and ideas in a convincing way. Part of being a hypnotherapist is making suggestions to the subconscious mind. These need to be delivered in a way that the subconscious understands and will want to act upon to create the change the client needs.
Creative Mind
Having a creative mind is an added bonus as a hypnotherapist. Sometimes we are presented, by our clients, with challenging problems that we may not have seen before or situations where they seem simply unable to change. Having the ability to be creative and adapt your approach is very important in helping the client to have a successful outcome.
Non-judgemental
As a hypnotherapist you will need to put aside your personal beliefs and ideas. You will need to be in a non-judgemental state, regardless of what the client says or does. If the client believes for one moment that you are judging them negatively, you will lose rapport and then change becomes more difficult.
All of the above are useful to have but with the right hypnotherapy course many of the factors should be addressed as part of the course.
How to become a hypnotherapist
As we have already mentioned, there are many hypnotherapy schools in the United Kingdom offering courses and advice how to become a hypnotherapist, some good, some not so good and some bad.
The first thing to remember is that hypnotherapy is a practical business. You will be working with real people with real problems. Some maybe more straightforward like smoking, weight or phobias. Sometimes, however, a client’s problems can be a little bit more complicated so when faced with this scenario, all the textbooks may go out the window and you have to draw on your experience. If your training didn’t provide you with the analytical skills and practical experience then you’re going to get into trouble.
The problem is it is more difficult for schools to teach analytical skills. It is much easier just to spend the time reading to students and pontificate on which techniques work best with which sort of problem. That is not how to become a hypnotherapist.
We believe that a blend of practical demonstrations, where possible with real clients, and a wide range of practical, adaptable techniques work best. When it comes to the techniques, they should be demonstrated and practiced so that the student understands exactly when and how they can be applied. When the techniques are experienced firsthand by the student, they get an appreciation of what the client will experience and the power of that technique.
The training should be backed up with detailed course material made available to the student. This frees the student to concentrate on the learning.
This is in direct contrast to the hypnotherapy training schools that offer a traditional approach to hypnotherapy, using scripts and generalised techniques. This, in fairness, is the way the vast majority of hypnotherapists have been trained in the past.
However, we believe that this form of training can leave the hypnotherapist feeling as though they are lost at sea when they first start practising and positively terrified with their first few clients.
It is much better if they have worked with some clients during their training whilst they are supervised. This allows them to build up their confidence and create a belief in their ability to deal with what emerges, efficiently and competently.
Many courses are highly theoretical with little practical experience, which can leave the graduate under-experienced to deal with the public. We would suggest that you avoid the overly academic courses as they simply do not meet the needs of a therapist in the real world. We would suggest that that is NOT how to become a hypnotherapist.
With our diploma in hypnotherapy training we manage to achieve this with our in-person training and even with our online hypnotherapy training.
Buy our How to Become a Hypnotherapist Book
If you would like to buy our “How to Become a Hypnotherapist Book” it is available as an ebook here.