OK, so today’s the day that a huge amount of people ‘fall off their resolution’. You may be about to wobble, or need a pep talk to carry on getting where you want. The fact you’ve a bad habit means it’s most likely automatic, or what we has hypnotherapists would call ‘unconscious behaviour’.
There are many of different ways to help you get you what you want and we thought we’d break that into 4 very effective strategies that you may find helpful & that you can do with or without the aid of a hypnotherapist in London.
- A day at a time
As Chairman Mao said, ‘the march of a thousand miles begins with a single step’. This has two implications for resolutions:
- Plan to do this properly. Having a goal such as I want to get fit / stop drinking for 3 months / quitting sugar etc are great goals. However, just thinking about your goal for a few minutes on Jan 1st and putting it to one side and hoping for miracles to happen is not an effective strategy. Work out a realistic timeline for you to do whatever it is you want / need to do. Think of the people training for a marathon. They spend months building up for that one day. It may take you a little time to get into training. You can find our guide to SMART goals in a previous blog posting.
- Go easy on yourself. As opposed to all or nothing thinking, which perhaps you may experiencing, recognise that’s going to do you no favours whatsoever. This is because with habits and resolutions, as with many things in life, it’s not just about 100% success or 100% failure. There’s a huge sea in between. So, if you’ve planned properly and perhaps had a bad day / few days, that’s all it is. Over the course of a year, if you have more good than bad days, that’s a good result.
- Do you believe you can do this?
Sometimes when learning a new skill or stopping something we don’t want to be doing, we run into many forms of limiting beliefs e.g. ‘I can’t do this’, ‘it’s too hard’ etc. As beliefs are so powerful and mainly driven by our automatic, unconscious thoughts, it’s important to understand what it is you believe about your ability to achieve your goal. Do this by asking yourself some challenging questions e.g. ‘what do I believe, how do I know this is 100% true & who do I know that this belief wouldn’t work for’? Having honest answers with yourself will help you understand what you may need to believe differently, in order to get what you want.
To wheel out the phrasebook again, Henry Ford summarized this perhaps most elegantly with the phrase ‘if you believe you can or you can’t, you’re right’.
Put another way, do you think you are more likely or less likely to get what you want with how you’re talking to yourself right now?
- Be your own inner coach:
Be honest, do you talk to yourself in a good or bad way? Most of us talk in a negative voice, in a negative tone, with negative words to ourselves sometimes. It’s technical name is ‘negative internal self-talk’. Now, if you’re best friend spoke to you in the way you speak to you, they wouldn’t be your best friend probably, would they?
So, change how you speak to you!
Perhaps you could imagine how you would want your best friend, a teacher, a coach, a mentor that you either know, or would like to know would talk to you e.g Barack Obama. What encouragement do you need, what words would work for you? Think about this and construct a phrase and repeat this to yourself and play around with other variables such as tonality, volume & speed. Perhaps add some music. In short, become your own inner coach. The better you talk to yourself, the better you’ll believe about yourself.
And every day, keep a log of what you’ve done well, what you’ve learned and how you feel. Groove those new neural pathways of success. And look back at them on days that are a struggle.
I am pretty confident that if you think, be and do differently every day, you’ll end up feeling different in next to no time.
- Action / action / action:
One hard truth is that you are going to have to take massive action to get where you want to be. It’s totally normal for change in whatever guise to sometimes be challenging and uncomfortable.
From an action perspective, you can take action by actually doing what it is you want to achieve. Equally and concurrently, I would recommend spending a few minutes every day thinking about this and working out where you are on your SMART goal timeline.
Mentally, action is equally important. Spend as much time as you can creating the most compelling picture or film you can of you achieving whatever it is you want to do. Look at yourself doing it and carry on doing this until you can see yourself getting what you what, whatever the circumstance. Jack the intensity up by hearing all of the sounds and creating the feelings that go with you achaiving your aims.
Once you’ve done this ‘associate’ into your film or picture and see through your own eyes. Hear those sounds crystally clear and know and feel those great feelings of you doing what you want.
And remember, if you stick with your plan and follow these tips, you can be a success.
Now if you’re still struggling after that, you may need some help. Reversing negative behaivour and installing successful new unconscious behaviour is where a good hypnotherapist in London can come in. If you’d like a free consultation to see how we may be able to help you stop a habit, or perhaps start a healthier new one*, then give us a call on 0800 122 3073 and have a free 20 minute consultation, or email james@fmm.savimi.com.
Good luck!
