New Years Resolutions – Dream Building and Self Hypnosis

Dream Building & Self Hypnosis for your New Years Resolutions

As you might be able to imagine, I love doing my New Years Resolutions. I generally like dream-building type of exercises as they’re fun to do. I like to look back on my New Years Resolutions and am amazed how many of them are now a realitI have written up a couple of simple ideas below that have worked well for me over the years. The first is a dream building exercise to really let your creative juices flow in all directions. What do you feel enthusiastic about, what makes you feel motivated, fulfilled, and happy? Be specific or unlimited but really create some positive energy around it. The second is a simple self-hypnosis tool that is great for focusing on one thing that is most important to you at this time.

Dream Building Ideas

If such as time and money etc were no object, write down all the things that you would most like to do, be or to have. You can do this for the coming year, the next 5 years or 10 years. I like to do it for all three. I also split it into the different aspects of my life such as my dream family life, relationship, career, personal development, fitness, travel and perfect place to live.

Some of the things in the 10 year list were things I could not really believe would happen when I started this 12 years ago. They were so far from my reality then, but many of them have now come true. The power of the written word and focusing your mind on what you want instead of what you don’t enables you to achieve these things. It’s hard to reach your goal if you don’t have them clearly laid out and your brain is set up to work towards what you are focused on.

So that’s a great first step, to know what you want, and that can be enough. If you want to take it further with some of your most important or trickier goals, you can do the simple, short self-hypnosis below.

Self Hypnosis

Hypnosis is accessing your subconscious mind where all your habits, beliefs and emotions are stored. As a Hypnotherapist, I help to guide people to make the long-term changes they want here. I create a space for people to access this powerful part of their mind and guide them to make the changes they want.

However, everyone has experienced Hypnosis before. We do it naturally when we are doing anything repetitive, for example when you are watching a movie and jump at the scary bits or when you are driving and wonder how you got to your destination.

All hypnosis is really self-hypnosis as I can’t force people to make the change. But sometimes people just need a bit of extra help to get there and to work through changes.

For optimum results, do your self-hypnosis before you go to bed each night and/or before you get out of bed each morning as that is when your brain waves are in the best reprogramming mode. Otherwise do it at any time that suits you. I usually spend between 5 and 20 minutes for this exercise.

You can use this technique for whatever positive transformation you would like. However it’s best to work on one goal at a time and don’t move onto the next until you feel you have achieved what you want with that one. If we focus on too many things at once it can dilute the effectiveness.

1. Issue to be transformed.

Write down your goal or issue to be transformed on a piece of paper.

2. Self Hypnosis Induction

• Take 3 long, slow, deep abdominal breaths, letting go of any stress or negativities with every exhale. This breathing technique tells your body that everything is ok and allows you to relax. It is great to do at various times in the day to center yourself, relax and prepare yourself for anything.

• Now imagine a staircase leading down from 10 – 1 to a wonderful safe and peaceful place. You can see yourself slowly going down with each number, just take a few moments to do this.

When you reach the bottom, use all your senses to see, and feel the safe, beautiful place you have found. Take some time to notice just how good it feels to be there.

3. Imagine the Change

Use your wonderful imagination to touch, see, feel, hear and even taste the change! How would you respond differently? How do you want to feel, think and act? Really bring your goal to life and know that you have already begun to make the change(s) by your intention and using your imagination to bring it to life.

Remember our imagination is extremely powerful. From a neuroscientific point of view, imagining an act and doing it are similar. Brain scans show that many of the same parts of the brain are activated when doing something as when only imagining it. In the book ‘The Brain that Changes Itself’, the author Dr Norman Doidge MD writes about an experiment that demonstrates this. By just imagining doing finger exercises over a one month period, the muscle build increased almost as much as the group that actually did the exercises.

There are numerous bodies of research proving how effective using our imagination can be in all sorts of ways. I like this one as it is tangible and I hope it helps to inspire you to use your imagination to activate your dreamsJ

If you need any further information or support then please email me.

All the best for 2013 and all the years to come. Dare to dream!