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At a certain point in our adult life, we already have an idea about our life path – the direction in which LIFE wants to take you so that you can maximize your potential and celebrate life to its fullness. But sometimes, we take this path for granted and follow other paths not meant for us. But, we must respect our life path.

When Oprah was a guest of Piers Morgan, she was asked if she has ever entertained any presidential aspirations, Oprah told Morgan that one thing she knows about herself is how to stay in her lane. “This is what I admire about myself," she said. "I know what my lane is and I know to stay in my lane.”

We all have lanes. We all have life paths meant for us. Some people call it destiny. Some people call it life choice. But at a certain point in our adult life, we know what the direction that is best for us is. We know in our hearts and soul that there is something we are meant to be and we are meant to do that will bring the best in us.

For me, my life path is to be a healer. I cannot imagine being someone else. And it is my duty, my obligation to respect this path that is meant for me.

Other people know their path and surrenders to the pressures and demands of the world so that they follow other paths. Oftentimes, this leads to unhappiness and even sickness.

In my work in hypnotherapy, I find it sad that people are successful in their careers and yet they are not be as happy as should be and they live very stressful lives that contribute to their illnesses. I often challenge them to review their life direction and remain faithful to their path. Simply because remaining faithful to one’s life path is what bring fulfillment, health and prosperity.

Personal goals are like train stops in a long journey. They help you assess whether you are moving in the right direction at the pace of your choice. We want to be guaranteed that our life journey is going as we desire it to be. So, we set up goals.

Goal setting is also a powerful motivational tool. It provides you with the energy to solve problems, overcome stresses, and deal with the pressures of your life.

And knowing your goals help decision-making easier. It makes you choose what to say YES and what to say NO because goals help you prioritize and concentrate.

CREATE A BIG PICTURE FIRST AND CREATE A MENTAL IMAGE OF THIS IDEAL FUTURE

This is where hypnosis can come in. Before setting up your train stops, you have to decide on your final destination. The big picture is your life direction, your ideal future. The best way to wire this in your brain is to use hypnotherapy. The therapists can guide you in creating and implanting this mental image which will be used as your guide in goal-setting.

This may include:

Career – What is the end goal of your professional or work life?

Financial – What are your money goals?

Education – What is the level that you aim to achieve when it comes to education?

Family – What are your goals when it comes to family life? Do you want to get married and raise children?

Artistic - Do you want to achieve any artistic goals?

Personality – What are the attitudes and qualities that you aim to acquire?

Physical - Are there any athletic goals that you want to achieve, or do you want good health deep into old age? What steps are you going to take to achieve this?

Pleasure – How do you plan to enjoy life?

Public Service – What do you want to be your contribution to society? You can add to this list and the rest will follow.

As any addiction, gambling is a hard habit to kick. Mostly because people who have addictions rarely recognize that they have a problem. They usually say, “This is the last time..” or  “Just one more..”
They don’t even realize the ill effects it makes in their lives.

People literally go bankrupt. They also repeatedly alienate themselves to their family and friends because they hide their shame for what they are doing. The problem is, they can’t stop.

Hypnotherapy can dramatically change the person’s behavior and mindset to take away the gambling addiction. Whenever a patient is in a deeply relaxed state known as trance, it opens the mind to things that we normally would not be aware of. It creates access to unlock emotions.

A hypnotherapist’s first goal is to make the gambler aware of what is happening to them when they gamble and what satisfaction they get from this.
It may not be as superficial as winning; but for example, do they get a high from the recognition when they win or some sense of self worth? Or even losing it all might give a person a rush.

It is important to dig deeper than what we see on the outside. Learning the root cause of the gambling addiction leads to understanding and free the gambler from his addiction. Tapping into the subconscious can be a challenge. However, once access to the subconscious has been established, then an alteration of the mindset regarding what the client desires can be created.

For example, a client may clearly want to rid himself of gambling, or some would just want to gamble responsibly and not spin out of control.

Hypnosis is a powerful tool to set you free from your gambling addiction. What you do with this tool is up to you--
you are in control of your life. It is your decision if you want to break away from these addictions.

Statistics show that infertility has reached epidemic proportions. And most of these are because of the deep connection between the mind and the body.

Hynocoaching for fertility is a specific form of accompaniment that combines personal coaching and hypnotherapy towards the desired goal of having children.

What hypnosis does is to open the mind and unearth the mental blockages. These include:

a. Trauma – you may have a childhood trauma that prohibits the free flow of life in your body; this might include having abusive parents which developed a trauma about having children of one’s own
b. Fear – sometimes women or men have fear how a baby will affect their marriage and their careers, so there is an unconscious resistances
c. Grieving other pregnancies that did not come to term is also a psychological block

These are just some of the reasons why pregnancy can be difficult. By the use of hypnosis, you use your conscious and unconscious minds to free yourself from any block, including stresses.

But aside from hypnosis, the half of the twin treatment is personal coaching that helps you make relevant decisions about your life and your relationships. There are decisions that have to be made; decisions that will help in creating the right attitude towards having children.

So, in a way, all areas of life are addressed – your past, your present and your future are taken into consideration.

Some people sabotage their own success. Some are aware of it but claim to be helpless about it; some don’t have an idea that their own habits and attitudes are the main reasons why success seems to be elusive. They tend to blame others, even the weather, for their failures.

Starting the path towards getting the results you want – whether that is health, weight loss, career promotion, or marriage – is easy. Staying on track is the difficult part. That is when the fears will set in. That is when old habits return. That is when self-doubt will invade and distract you from getting the results you want.

Hypnocoaching is one of the most effective tools to stay on track in your path towards success. With the potent combination of personal coaching skills and expertise in hypnotherapy, a hypnocoach provides three essential ingredients:

a. A professionally trained guide in your life journey that allows you to explore other areas of your life that affects significantly your path to success. Hypnosis is probably the best tool to uncover memories that are stored in our unconscious – to make conscious what is unconscious is a step towards freedom.

b. A coach that assists by focusing on your life direction. This means providing tools to remove doubts, self-criticisms, old habits, and unhealthy outlooks. Tools such as script-revision and can alter your thought processes and make you think more positively.

c. A companion that you can work with even during off-hours (according to your needs). Present technology allows constant mentoring and coaching even if you are out of town.

We hear this time and again – oftentimes we are the ones who sabotage our own success. Our negative thoughts, our defeatist attitudes, our fears stop us from pursuing our dreams and achieving our goals. Some of us cherish our negative thoughts because these are our comfort zones. Failure becomes a destiny. Unfortunately, we cannot just let go of these negative mindsets – they are carved in our memories.

It happens even to the best of us. We are offered opportunities to succeed but we turn it down because we don’t feel confident that we can do it, even if others tell us that we can. We encounter people who love us but we hurt or reject them because our negative mindsets tell us that we don’t deserve their love. We see venues for promotion and career advancement and back out thinking that we can’t compete with others.

Negative mindsets are like chains that bind us to the past; and the failures of others. We need to free ourselves so that we can soar high.

And that is where hypnocoaching comes in as a wonderful tool. Hypnocoaching integrates the benefits of life coaching and the benefits of hypnotherapy to help clients overcome the fear of failure and reach success. With hypnocoaching, you can become free, you improve your self-esteem, and you find a sustaining motivation so that you reach your goals quicker than other types of therapies or tools.

Hypnosis unlocks your inner potentials and frees you from your negative self-image. Coaching, on the other hand, personally guides you to interpret your reality as you journey towards your goals. By combining these two, you remove emotional blocks, transform negative beliefs into positive ones, and gain confidence toward reaching whatever you desire.

Last May, a popular school principal in Florida made the national headlines after a student who he hypnotized committed suicide.

“George Kenney, principal since 2001 at North Port High School, had been using hypnosis for years and made podcasts on reducing test anxiety and improving sports performance through the technique. He also has a website that promotes hypnosis to banish fear and insecurity from your life. But his use of the practice came under scrutiny after Kenney acknowledged he had hypnotized Wesley McKinley, 16, the day before the teenager killed himself in April.” This is an excerpt from abcnews.com which highlighted the tragedy of this situation.

As much as I feel sad for the child, I will assert that this was simply an unfortunate, isolated incident. In fact, the general rule is that hypnosis helps in suicide prevention rather than the other way around.

In his book Hypnosis and the treatment of depressions: strategies for change, Michael D. Yapko provided evidence that depression that leads to suicide is best treated by hypnosis which he defines as a mode of influential communications. Dr. Yapko believes, as I do, that hypnosis actually raises hope and empowers an individual to take positive steps about his life.

It is not true that hypnosis controls a person’s life and thought processes. He is fully aware and is fully cooperative of everything that is happening to him. What hypnosis does is to lead a person to a full awareness of his thought processes and realize that in fact his hopelessness is just a state of mind – it is a lie invented by his own mind. Then he knows that truth that he is in fact capable of solving his own problems.

I know that there are people, including medical doctors and psychologists, who dismiss the idea of coaching for healing as a mere marketing ploy. And I don’t discount the possibility that there are people who just use terms in order to increase their market value. But these are few exceptions. As far as I know, healing coaches are committed to their job as a personal guide towards wholistic health.

I cannot speak in behalf of other healers and coaches, but I can speak of my own personal experience as a healer and as a coach who brings together years of practice, various trainings and a deep intuition.

These are the mains reasons why healing coaches are important today:

a. They provide a wholistic pathway. They guide their clients to interpret the effects of other medical interventions such as surgery, medicines, therapies etc.

b. They take care of the larger context. They make sure that the patients take into consideration the effect of their healing process on their work and in their relationships.

c. Oftentimes, they help patients connect their present health concerns with their life history. Through the use of hypnosis they unlock memories and mental attitudes that are sources of chronic diseases.

d. They are more available for their clients than other health practitioners.

We all know this: negative thoughts can be destructive to the human brain or to human life itself. Depression – the state of low mood and aversion to activity that can affect a person's thoughts, behaviour, feelings and physical well-being – is one of the most alarming mental disorders that affect a large section of the population. Doctors have developed drug treatments and therapies in the treatment of depression, but how about hypnotherapy? Does it work?

In my experience as a healer and hypnotherapist, it does. There are at least three important effects of hypnotherapy:

1. It rewrites the inner script of a person – moving him or her away from negative thoughts and bad judgments about the self towards positive, transformative thinking
2. It helps release the negative energies that cloud the mind and prevent good judgment
3. It helps a patient return to the roots of the negative thoughts and allows healing to happen.

I believe that hypnotherapy is an essential component of depression treatment – together with physical exercises, a good diet, counseling and medical interventions.

I always encounter this question, especially from clients who don’t have time to go to the office but who believe in the effectiveness of hypnotherapy and its potential to help set off and create life changing events or even change a lifestyle to start a healthy living.

Let me begin by emphasizing that hypnosis in not mind control. “It's a naturally occurring state of concentration; it's actually a means of enhancing your control over both your mind and your body." according to Dr. David Spiegel, Associate Chair of Psychiatry at Stanford University. Thus, you are in no real danger when you are on your own, except if you have a history of such mental disorders like schizophrenia.

Whether with a hypnotherapist or an audio guide, you are the only one who can choose to enter into a hypnotic state. Nobody can force you to do that, and that means it is actually within your control. In fact, it is within your full self-control.

Self hypnosis can be effective with the aid of audio guides that has brainwave entrainment. Some hypnotist use this effect with their CD’s to create a deeper brainwave state of mind. The mind becomes entrained to binaural beats entrenched into sound files and it physically puts your brain into a much more receptive state for the hypnotic suggestions. Using different combinations of brainwave states can be generated for a series of effects. In fact within few minutes of using a self hypnosis mp3 audio that includes brainwave entrainment, your brain coordinates to a frequency that has established successful results in receiving affirmation.

But it is very important to choose the right audio guide. Most of the online downloadable versions allow a pre-testing so that you can truly check whether the voice and the script will help you to a deeper relaxation and trance.

I still encourage people to combine self-hypnosis with a session with a hypnotherapist not just to guide the process but to aid in fully understanding the revelations from each session.

Our body is a communication facility. It sends messages daily to us. It provides us with excellent insights into its present state, its health and wellness. These signals are oftentimes too ordinary that we ignore them or we don’t really listen to them, instead we send back exactly the same response. Some people take the same medicine every time they have headaches without really listening to what the body is trying to say.

Those who truly care for their bodies should learn how to pay attention to its messages. Aside from the regular messages and signals our body sends daily – such as pulse beat, temperature, blood pressure – we need to use our senses:

a. Our sense of sight – what do you see in your body that is quite unusual? Any bumps, new moles, warts, discoloration? Those are signals from the body. Is your skin changing? Is it turning yellow?

b. Our sense of smell – is there a particular part of the body that has an unpleasant smell? That might be a signal of a more serious condition

c. Our sense of touch – women are always asked to do a physical check up of their breasts. Touch your head, your belly, your skin. Are there changes?

d. Our sense of hearing – listen to your body, literally. Do your bones crackle when you move? Do you pass gas more often than before? Do you burp more than the usual? These are important sounds you need to pay attention to.

e. Our sense of taste – does your food taste differently? Have you lost your taste? Again, it is good to pay attention to these changes.

There are signals that are meant to warn; but there are signals meant to raise an alarm. What is important is you pay attention to what your body is saying, before it is too late.

It is a known fact that smokers who get support have higher percentage of success than those who quitting smoking on their own. But those who get support from professional coaches are known to get faster and more lasting success.

Why is that? What makes coaching more effective? What difference does coaching do to those who desire to stop smoking?

1. Often times, coaches, who are trained to handle both physical and emotional aspects aside from the behavioral dimension of smoking, use a potent combination of therapeutic techniques including hypnosis, Neurolinguistic Programming, Emotional Freedom Techniques and others which help reframe the mind and tame the body

2. Coaching is a personalized process. Unlike guided meditations and other programs which are mass produced, coaching is a very individual approach. A lot of the programs are tailored based on your personal responses.

3. Coaching is more encompassing. It helps you deal with such specific concerns such as withdrawal symptoms and how to prepare and deal with them; identifying and taming your personal triggers; handling with mood swings and depression that follow quitting; creating new habits to substitute smoking; manage the stresses that area associated with smoking; and more.

4. Coaching includes specific techniques for stress management such as breathing and meditations.

Weight management is not just a physical issue. If it was, then Oprah would have been much thinner by now. The fact that even the best of us continue to struggle with weight only means that there is so much about weight than the number on the scale. It involves our habits yes, but there mental and emotional issues that support these habits.

This is where coaching comes in. It offers a holistic approach that explores the various dimensions of a person’s weight and offers everything such as Hypnosis, NeuroLinguistic Programming, Reiki, Emotional Freedom Technique, Counseling and Spiritual Healing to address multiple levels of issues. The result is an inner freedom that removes the struggle with food.

The coaching process helps you in several ways:

1. It gives you a daily awareness of your change plan so you don’t feel alone in going through this journey.

2. It helps you stay motivated and remain positive throughout your weight-loss program.

3. It provides tools and insights to assist you in your ongoing self-discovery.

4. It creates a process that enhances your relationship with food and your relationship with your body towards a healthy body image.

5. It enables you to overcome key challenges that might arise in the process.

6. It helps you see weight loss as part of a bigger life plan.

Well, basically it is coaching people in getting insights via spirituality. We often read about how spiritual masters in sacred temples have disciples. These disciples submit themselves to the guidance of their masters in order to achieve enlightenment. Such was the relationship between Jesus Christ and the twelve apostles. The Zen Master Ma Tzu has as his Disciple Nansen. Discipleship is the purest form of spiritual coaching. However, there are other ways of guiding people to gain insights through their spirituality.

A spiritual coach does not live in temples nor spend their time reading scriptures and meditating but they are trained to guide people to look at their inner landscapes – their minds, bodies, and souls – and find the insights they can use to reach their life goals.

Spiritual coaches believe that spirituality is one of the best tools to overcome life's troubles and challenges. A spiritual coach guides you to be free from a lifetime's worth of limitations and help you find joy and true peace.

Oftentimes, they call it the attainment of enlightenment, or the awareness, or the consciousness. All these mean that spirituality can help us reach our maximum potentials.

The human spirit has a force that is oftentimes described as stronger than nuclear energy. This is the human spirit that helps people climb Mount Everest, survive a war, move on from a tsunami disaster, offer their lives for the people in Africa. This is the powerhouse of human potential that makes us fully human. And a spiritual coach helps us tap these energies.

In the olden times, being barren is a cause of shame to women. Barren women were considered cursed by the gods and were treated as bad luck and useless people.  In the Bible of the Christian world, Elizabeth was a barren woman who found grace from God and bore fruit when she was very old. Today, we do not look at infertility as a because of a curse. It is a complex problem that may have a solution.

Fertility is not just a physical issue; it could also be an emotional one. Today’s stressful environment and high-pressured jobs have often denied couples one of their wishes – pregnancy.

These reproductive failures and fertility problems may come from physical, emotional and psychological imbalances. That is why, more and more, hypnocoaching is used as a supplementary treatment for couples who seek to have a baby.

Coaching for fertility is a rare and specific field of coaching that provides guidance to women and their partners to fully explore the causes of infertility, the impact of fertility of the emotions, relationships and self-esteem of the couple, etc.

What hypnocoaching does is to free the couple from any emotional and historical barrier that may hinder the reproductive process. This includes preparing the couple psychological for the coming pregnancy.

Come to the edge, he said.

They said: We are afraid.

Come to the edge, he said.

They came.

He pushed them and they flew.

The short poem above, attributed to French poet Guillaume Apollinaire, captures best what coaching is all about, although not so much forceful pushing, but leading the person to trust in himself in order to jump and find out that, in fact, he can soar. Actor Jeremy Irons, who finds this poem a personal inspiration, said that, "It (the poem) deals with risk and trust and the magic that occurs sometimes when you do either."

Humans are transcendent beings. We are designed to go beyond our limits and ascend to greater heights – in our performance, in our values, in our desires. Coaches help people recognize these limits and identify their strength so they can be pushed to fly high.

The benefits of coaching include:

a.       Increase performance in all areas of life

b.      Greater motivation to reach personal goals and targets                           

c.       Increased openness to personal learning and development 

d.      Higher self-awareness and increase in self-knowledge                                     

e.      Finding solutions to specific issues                                                  

f.       Greater ownership and responsibility                                                                              

g.       Acquiring new sets of skills and behaviors                                                                               

h.      Clarity of roles in life, whether in family or in work         

These are just some of the many clear benefits of coaching. But it is not just in measurable indicators that coaching finds its fulfillment, it is in enjoying the feeling of knowing that you have the wings the fly. 

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