Let’s get motivated with hypnotherapy. Matthew is focusing on how hypnotherapy can help individuals keep their motivation levels high well in to the New Year.
Hypnotherapy can help with motivation because most of us start with good intentions to lose weight, take up exercise, stop smoking, or change our lives in one way or another on 1 January, only to find that the motivation has gone out the window by the middle of January.
“New Year’s Resolutions can sometimes be an additional pressure that we put on ourselves to do something new or different, especially after the excesses of Christmas. However, we need to understand our true motivation and understand the ‘whys’ of what we want to do before we can really fulfil our goals.”
So, what’s the key to maintaining motivation, what really drives us to make positive changes? Some theories suggest motivation is a sort of positive reward for achieving something – “If I lose weight I will be confident on the beach this summer”. Other theories suggest a converse effect; if we DON’T do something, then something negative might happen, for example “I had better give up smoking or I may get lung cancer like my father did”.
It seems that thinking of positive outcomes or goals usually motivates us more than negative ones, but then why do so many of us fail to fulfil our goals, even when we can see that we are going to benefit from completing what we set out to do?
There are many reasons why, sometimes it’s just about getting our goal right in the first place. Goal-setting theory suggests we may all have some form of drive to reach an end goal, but the effectiveness of this depends on three main things:
– how far away that goal is
– how hard it is to achieve that goal
– how clearly it is defined
“Solution Focused Hypnotherapy is a modern, research-based combination of psychotherapy and hypnosis, aimed at encouraging clients to focus on how they want things to be. We work with our clients to help them set their own realistic goals. We encourage them to break things down in to smaller chunks or mini-goals, so progress can be measured and it’s easier to see the movement forward. That in itself is a great motivator. There’s nothing like seeing your own progress to help you move towards your goal, and that enables clients to maintain their motivation well after the seasonal festivities have become a distant memory.”
