Weight Loss Hypnosis Part 5 – No Pain, No Gain!

No Pain, No Gain!

Many people set goals and immediately talk about how they’ll reward themselves if they achieve them. While such rewards would indeed be deserved, they are not the best way of motivating oneself.

Fear of pain is much greater than desire for gain. Simply put, people will do a lot more to avoid suffering pain than to experience pleasure. Therefore, a much better means of motivating yourself is to choose not what will give yourself if you achieve your goal, but rather what you’ll give away should you fail in your attempts.

Think of one of your most prized possessions.  It may be your wide-screen TV, your top-of-the-range mobile phone or perhaps your laptop computer. Whatever possession you choose, it must be something that you’d really hate to lose. The more pain you associate with it being taken away, the more you’ll be motivated and driven to achieve your goal. 

Vitally important is that you commit to such a pledge and that you truly feel the fear of such a potential loss. The best way to do this is to set your goals with a friend, together with the failure forfeits involved.

Do this correctly and every decision you make, regarding the foods you eat and exercise you take, will be positively influenced by the thought of pain should you fail to reach your goals.

Weight Loss Hypnosis Part 4 – The New Behaviour Generator Strategy

In the last article, I introduced the New Behaviour Strategy Generator and it’s application to weight loss.  Today, I’m going to take you through the exercise so you can apply it to your weight loss goals.

The 4 Main Steps Of The New Behaviour Generator Strategy Are:

Step 1. Select a behaviour worth having

A. Identify the wanted behaviour

B. Specify the context

C. Identify your role model

D. Evaluate your role model

Step 2. Replace your role model with yourself and evaluate

Step 3. Associate into manifesting the behaviour

Step 4. Future-pace and test.

While this strategy can be used to make any behavioural changes, we will now look at how you can apply it to weight-loss, health and fitness. The New Behaviour Generator Strategy needs to be first understood, and then applied. In other words, you need to put in the required work to make the desired changes. I will firstly guide you through the procedure, and then you will apply it to your goals.

Step 1. Select a behaviour worth having

•  Identify the wanted behaviour

Choose a behaviour you want to be able to do, but have never done before, or one you would like to do better than you are presently doing. Examples would include eating healthy foods, regularly going to the gym and getting 8 hours of quality sleep every night.

• Specify the context

Identify when and where you want to be able to do this behaviour.  While you may automatically think “Oh all the time!”, this would be a mistake. No behaviour is appropriate in every context. So be specific as to when it would be most useful to behave in the way you want.

• Identify your role model 

Pick somebody who has achieved the weight-loss results you want.  It would be best if this person started from the position you are currently in, as opposed to somebody who has been slim, fit and healthy all of his or her life. It is not important that you know this person personally or not. All that matters is that you have some representations of him or her behaving in the way that you want to behave yourself.

• Evaluate role model

Now imagine this person doing the chosen behaviour. The images must be in the form of an imaginary movie, showing your role model demonstrating, in an appropriate context, the behaviour you have chosen. Observe how the person moves. Notice his/her posture, facial expressions, gestures, words he/she commonly uses, voice tone, volume, and tempo.

Once you have done this in vivid detail, have another think as to whether or not you want to behave in this way. Having taken a close look at it, do you still want to adopt this behaviour?

 If you decide that you don’t, you need to make some adjustments. If you are unhappy with the role model, then simply choose another more suitable person. If it is the behaviour itself that is unwanted, return to the beginning of the strategy and select another, more suitable behaviour.

If you do want to adopt the behaviour, proceed to the next step.

Step 2. Replace your role model with yourself and evaluate.  

Now change the movie you made and replace your role model with yourself. It is as if you are watching a movie of yourself manifesting the same behaviour as your role model. See yourself on the screen, doing all things that he/she does so brilliantly.

Watch how you move. Notice your posture, facial expressions, gestures, words you use, voice tone, volume and tempo. Pay particular attention to the responses of the people around you there on the screen. Take your time doing this part. Make any necessary adjustments and improvements as you move through the movie.

Step 3. Associate into manifesting the behaviour. 

Once you can see yourself in the movie, step inside the body of the character on-screen and imagine yourself actually doing the chosen behaviour. See what you would be seeing. Hear what you would hear, including what you’d be saying to yourself. Feel what you would be feeling. Be especially aware of the way your body feels as you perform the new behaviour. Focus on each sensory system separately, and then all of them together.

Step 4. Future-pace and test

Future-pacing is an NLP technique that involves mentally rehearsing oneself through some future situation in order to ensure that the wanted behaviours will happen naturally and appropriately in the suitable contexts.

Think back to a time in the past when you would have liked to have had the behaviour you currently desire. An example might be the ability to eat 4 healthy meals per day, without eating any snacks in between. Imagine how different things would be now if you had consistently displayed this behaviour in the past.

Now imagine a time in the future where you need to behave in the new and improved way. Ask yourself what will be the very first thing you will see, hear, or feel externally in that situation that will remind you of your skills. These will serve as natural and unconscious anchors in the future. For example, you may hear a certain sound that acts as a trigger, enabling you to access the desired behaviour.

Athletes use future-pacing all the time when preparing for competition.  A football player will imagine taking his next penalty. He will focus on such factors as the sounds he will hear around him, the self-talk he uses to motivate himself, the feeling of striking the ball smoothly and powerfully, and the way the goal looks so big in front of him, almost inviting him to burst its net.

To use future-pacing in a weight-loss or fitness context, simply apply exactly the same procedure as the one described above. Create vivid and precise sights, sounds and feelings. The more detailed you are, the more “real” they will become. This will make it easy to access the desired behaviour at the appropriate times in the future.

Weight Loss Hypnosis Part 3 – Create The Reality You Want

“All that we are is the result of what we have thought” – Buddha

If you have frequently failed in past attempts to lose weight, you may be wondering what the solution is and where you can access it. Many people switch to another diet, a new exercise routine, or worst of all desperately resort to dangerous slimming pills. Yet the answer is not located in a diet, a gym or in a bottle of pills. The location is actually between your ears. Your brain is either hot-wired for success or programmed for failure.

Think back to all the times you set your sights on a goal and failed to achieve it. Why do you think you failed? Did you have the right plan to succeed? Were you motivated enough to put your thoughts into action?

How do you believe you can change things in the future in order to transform fear into power, frustration into inspiration, and failure into victory? The answer is by using the New Behaviour Generator Strategy.

John Grinder, the co-creator of Neuro Linguistic Programming, developed the New Behaviour Generator Strategy in the late 1970s. It is a step-by-step procedure, which allows you to try out new behaviours and rehearse them inside yourself so that you have a reference experience.  This means that you can create the experience of having already done something, before you actually do it. Stop for a moment and look at all the items around you. If you are sitting in a room in your house, maybe you can see a television, a table, a sofa and a fireplace. Before all of these items were made in reality, they were first developed in the minds of their creators. The article you are reading now was first created in my mind, before I went ahead and turned my reference experience into a reality.

Athletes do this all the time when visualising themselves breaking records. They see themselves doing it, hear the sounds around them before and afterwards, and associate fully with how they will feel once they do it. Once they combine total self-belief with a compelling reference experience, it is then just a matter of simply doing it.

The Strategy Is Based On The Following Key Beliefs:

i)People learn new behaviours by creating new mental maps in their brains.

ii) The more complete you make your mental maps, the more likely you will be to achieve the new behaviour you want.

iii) Focusing on your goal is the quickest way to achieve new behaviours.

iv)People already have the mental resources they need to achieve new behaviours. Success is a function of accessing and organising what is already there.

You can use the New Behaviour Generator Strategy to achieve your weight-loss goals easily and effortlessly. Can you think of someone who has achieved the weight-loss results you want, having previously been a similar size to you before they started? If you can, then you’re already halfway towards your goal. If someone else can do something, then so can you. All you need to do is find out such information as to what they did, how they were thinking, what they believed, and the language they were using when talking to themselves as well as to others.

Once you have done this, you can modify these behaviours and use them to achieve your own goals. In NLP terms, this is called modelling. What makes it so effective and rewarding is that you are following a proven way to get the results you want, without having to go through all the trial and error that your role model experienced on the path to his or her goals.

In the next article, I’ll go through the 4 main steps of the New Behaviour Generator Strategy so that you can do the exercise yourself.  In the meantime, get out a pen and paper and write down what new behaviour you need to adopt in order to achieve your weight loss goals.

Stop Smoking with Hypnosis

Hi everyone,

Welcome to the first of my series of hypnosis videos.  This one will be a quick overview of my approach to using hypnosis to help clients to stop smoking.  If, after watching this video, you have any questions, you can contact me through my facebook page:  www.facebook.com/paul.hurley.  Any feedback, good or bad, is always welcome.

Here’s the link:  http://screenjel.ly/Q9nUzNEim9c

Weight Loss Hypnosis Part 1 – The Structure of the Mind

An understanding of how the mind works is crucial to understand both the way you are now and how to change in order to be the way you are now and how to change in order to be the way you want.  In this article, I will discuss the make-up of the mind and how your beliefs and habits are formed.

The Mind Can Be Separated Into 3 Sections:

1. The Unconscious Mind

2. The Conscious Mind

3. The Subconscious Mind

While the Unconscious Mind plays a crucial role in maintaining you automatic bodily functions and your immune system, it is your Conscious, Subconscious and what is known as the Critical Factor that are of critical importance when it comes to weight-loss, health and fitness. 

The Conscious Mind

Your address, your phone-number, your alarm code, your route to work and what you ate for breakfast today. These are just some of the things you can easily remember. Your conscious mind stores all of your short-term memories, information that you need to call upon on a regular basis.

The Conscious Mind also consists of the Analytical, Logical and Rational parts of the mind. When someone is talking to you, for example, the Analytical and Logical parts are at work, trying to make sense and evaluate what the person is saying to you. It is the Rational part of the mind, however, that gets people into trouble.

Think of all the things you currently do that you really know you shouldn’t. Why do you eat when you’re not hungry? Why do you smoke? Why do you drink too much? The answers that immediately pop into your head are a result of the actions of the Rational part of your mind. The function of the Rational part is to justify all of your actions, good or bad. People who smoke know of the damage they are inflicting upon their bodies. The Rational part comes up with a list of reasons to defend their smoking habit:

“It helps me concentrate”, “It eases my nerves”, “If I stop, I’ll put on loads of weight!”

The same applies to people who are overweight:

“I’m fat because my parents are fat”, “I have a slow metabolism”, “I only need to look at chocolate and I put on weight!”

The Rational part of our minds is always working hard to make us look good. It does so to protect us. There are many highly intelligent people who are in psychiatric hospitals because they have lost touch with the Rational parts of their minds. They are doing things like inflicting self-damage and they cannot come up with a valid reason for doing so.

As a result, they go insane. So the intentions of the Rational part are totally well meaning. The problem is that it never comes up with the right reason for your bad habits. It is vital that you understand this, so that you ignore what the Rational part of your mind is telling you is the reason so that you can discover the real reason.

The Subconscious Mind

The best way to explain the Subconscious mind is to compare it to an organic computer. All of your memories are stored in your Subconscious mind. Things that you thought you forgot are actually part of your permanent memory. With the use of regression hypnosis, you can remember anything that has ever happened to you, including your birth! Your subconscious memory is like a non-stop video recording of your life. Nothing is judged, filtered, distorted or analysed. It is non-judgemental. Once it enters the subconscious mind, it is just stored there. Our emotions and habits are determined by the subconscious mind.

The Critical Factor

Due to the fact that the Subconscious mind is non-judgemental, the Conscious mind works to protect it, doing its absolute best to ensure that no damaging beliefs or suggestions are accepted. Both the Logical and Analytical parts of the Conscious Mind work together choosing what to accept or reject. They put up a barrier called the Critical Factor, which compares new information to existing beliefs and associated pieces of information learned in the past and held in permanent memory of the Subconscious mind. If the new information is significantly different, it is rejected as being not true.

Unfortunately, you don’t develop your critical factor until you are approximately midway into your childhood. You believe everything your parents tell you because you trust them unconditionally and have yet to develop your ability to think critically. Your teachers, peers, environment, family and what you see on the television all fill your mind with beliefs and suggestions. Since you are blissfully unaware of everything you are unconsciously absorbing, you have absolutely no choice as to what to reject or accept. This is where so many limiting beliefs are formed.

Maybe you were taunted about your weight in school and as a result, you believe you are a fat person. On the other hand, it might have been a totally harmless comment, made by someone, which you interpreted in such a way that caused you hurt and pain. Many parents unwittingly pass on their limiting beliefs to their children.

Believing that they themselves are overweight because of their parents, they pass on the same limiting beliefs to their kids. Such beliefs are stored deep in the Subconscious and, until changed, have a huge effect on that person’s habits throughout their lives.

Advertisers are always attempting to bypass the critical factor in order to plant their suggestions in your Subconscious mind and thereby influence your actions. They can do so in several ways. The first is to recruit an “expert” or a personality who you trust unconditionally. This could be a highly qualified doctor or a sports personality who you’ve always greatly admired. When they rave about how great a certain product is, they totally bypass your critical factor and their suggestions take effect.

Another great way to achieve the critical factor bypass is via distraction.  What have gorgeous women got to do with cars? Absolutely NOTHING!

While the Conscious minds of all the hot-blooded males are fixated on the charms of the female in question, the suggestions made during the advertisement are shot directly into the Subconscious totally unchallenged. The same process happens during advertisements featuring classic songs you know well. The ad starts and your Conscious mind focuses on the melody of the song. As you hum and smile thinking about the good associations you have with that song, your Subconscious mind is like putty in the hands of the advertiser.

Think of all the fitness “experts” whose advice you have followed unconditionally. They must be right, mustn’t they? After all, they have PhDs, are best-selling authors and even have their own TV shows. Why then, after following their advice, did you fail to get the results they promised? The sad truth is that many of these “experts” are not really experts at all. Because you think they are, however, they achieve critical factor bypass and anything they say or suggest will greatly influence you.

The aim of my blogs, articles and videos is to arm you with the knowledge and, most importantly, the critical thinking skills to become your own bonafide expert!

Weight Loss Hypnosis Part 2 – Willpower is Nil Power

 “I just can’t get the results I want. If only I had more willpower.”

So many people believe that if only they had more willpower, they’d achieve their goals easily and effortlessly. When they fail, they blame themselves and attribute their failure to their lack of this seemingly magical ingredient of success.

Rely on willpower, however, and you will fail each and every time.

There is a simple reason for this and it is the same for everyone.  Willpower is part of the conscious mind. It is only designed to provide very short-term motivation, and is never meant to be relied upon for long-term change. Willpower will help you to refuse a single offer of a piece of chocolate but it will never, by itself, enable you to give up chocolate permanently.

Think of willpower as being like “mental adrenalin”. Adrenalin provide you with a short-term burst of extra strength in an emergency situation, after which it diminishes back to normal levels. Willpower is exactly the same. Say, for example, you want to give up chips and you use willpower to help you attain this goal. You will hold out for as long as you can, maintaining the struggle for as long as possible. It might be a week, a month or even 6 months. One day, however, your willpower reserves will eventually expire and you will eat a big plate of chips.

Most people, only knowing the one method, will blame themselves and return to another tortuous path of willpower-fuelled deprivation. This time, however, will be a little different. Whereas you may have been able to hold out for as long as 6 months the first time, you may struggle to last even half that length of time the second time around. Since its reserves are limited, your willpower levels diminish until they eventually expire to nothing. If you want to make permanent changes in your life, be sure to realise that doing so is impossible using willpower alone.

This is why diets are ineffective for long-term change. Since they are based on deprivation and “being good”, it’s only a matter of time until you give in and revert to those “bad” foods once again. Being healthy, slim and fit does not mean a life of suffering and pain. When you change the way your brain works, then your thoughts change and the way you act changes too. Different actions cause different results.

So realise that it all starts off in your mind.