I strongly encourage clients to use written suggestions with their self hypnosis. Yes, in a pinch you can give yourself suggestions without writing them out, but there is added value in the writing and reading process. The most important point is that you use self hypnosis at least 5 times a day, everyday. I am frequently asked if I use self hypnosis. My response, ABSOLUTELY! Most days I use it at least a dozen times throughout the day. Hypnosis is all about you being in control of you. Learn how to hypnotize yourself and take back your power!

Hypnotic Suggestions and Imagery

You should now be able to enter into hypnosis entirely by yourself. The next step is to formulate your own hypnotic suggestions. There are several important points you should consider before beginning.

Tips for creating suggestions

1. Keep suggestions short and concise.
2. Use only positive words. Do not use “no,” “not,” “don’t,” etc. (Your subconscious mind does not grasp a negative qualifier and you might get the opposite result.) Focus on what you do want. Never: “I don’t crave chocolate.” Instead, “Fruit is my snack of choice.”
3. Keep vocabulary simple. A 6-year-old child should be able to understand it.
4. Practice using “I” statements, “You” statements and “He/She” statements and see what works best for you. For example: I feel my body becoming healthier every day; You are enjoying eating foods that promote weight release; She keeps her promises to herself about healthy eating.
5. Use only two or three suggestions per session when using the light switch technique.
6. Use only present tense words. Never use “will,” “want to,” “going to” or “like to”.
7. Use action words such as “enjoy,” “love,” or “desire.”

Examples

• I love and enjoy exercise.
• Exercise is my favorite activity of the day.
• As a result of my exercise, I am calm, relaxed and have more energy.
• I love fruits, vegetables and whole grains.
• Fruit is my snack of choice.
• I only eat enough to meet my nutritional needs.
• It is okay for me to leave food on my plate.
• I drink six or more glasses of water each day.
• Water is my drink of choice.
• I am calm and relaxed.
• I sleep soundly and restfully throughout the night and I wake in the morning relaxed, refreshed and excited by the new day.

From Becoming Slender For Life, pages 55 – 56

To learn more about hypnosis, sign up for my free course by scrolling back up the page–the sign-up box is on your right in the sidebar. You can also learn hypnosis with the Light Switch by clicking here.

Click here for more on Written Suggestions

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The Light Switch is the self hypnosis technique that I teach to all of my Seattle hypnosis and Bainbridge Island hypnosis clients. There are many excellent self-hypnosis techniques, I teach the Light Switch because it is easy to use and it works. I recommend practicing the Light Switch technique 5 times a day, daily for 0ne week before using suggestions. It really is OK to do nothing more than breathe.

Light Switch Self Hypnosis

From Becoming Slender For Life

1. Place yourself in a SAFE and COMFORTABLE position.
2. GIVE YOURSELF A TIME LIMIT (one minute).
3. Raise and lower your index finger. When your finger touches whatever it is resting on, close
your eyes and drop into a deep state of hypnosis. TURN YOUR LIGHT SWITCH OFF.
4. While you are in hypnosis DO NOT THINK ABOUT THE TIME. Your subconscious mind does that for you.
5. Emerge when you have the feeling that your time is up.

Light switch technique

Let’s begin by practicing just getting into trance. First, you are going to look at your watch, a clock, your computer or your cell phone and note the time both in minutes and in seconds. Learn to use hypnosis in one minute. You can take several one-minute periods throughout your day. Most of us would struggle to find time for one fifteen-minute session, let alone several fifteen-minute sessions. If you’ve ever had the experience of waking up just before your alarm clock goes off, it’s the same thing. Ask your subconscious mind to let you know when a minute is up.

Then imagine that your finger is a light switch that magically controls all the muscles in your body. You and you alone control your light switch. No one else can turn you on or off. Only you can do that. When it is off, do not move. If you want to scratch an itch or answer the phone, simply turn your light switch back on.

When you are comfortably seated, raise your index finger and when you are ready, close your eyes, lower your finger and shut off your light switch. (I suggest using your index finger to represent your light switch. You may choose to use a different finger, your whole arm, or tap your foot—just use some physical signal.)

Upon shutting off your light switch, imagine an endless staircase of relaxation. Imagine that as you descend these stairs, each step down takes you deeper, deeper, 100 times more deeply relaxed.

Go to your favorite, relaxing place. For me it is Paipu Beach on Maui. I can feel the straw mat under my back and the heat of the sand coming up through that mat and the heat of the sun on my body. I hear the cardinals in the bushes behind me, the coconut leaves rustling in the breeze and the waves crashing. I smell the sweet scent of plumeria mixed with the salt air, and I am quickly very deeply relaxed. Do this for one minute. For our purpose a minute is roughly 55 to 65 seconds. (Don’t get hung up on exact timing.)

You do not need to climb back up the stairs, but you do need to turn your switch back on as you open your eyes. Don’t worry about your thoughts or where your mind goes at this stage. This is not meditation, where you are trying to eliminate mind chatter. Later, when you add suggestions, your mind will have something to focus on. But for now, just experience being in your favorite place.

When your subconscious mind lets you know a minute is up, turn on your light switch and see how close to a minute you came. Like all skills, the more you practice, the better you become.

Practice self-hypnosis five times a day every day

You need reminders and you need to anchor or hook this to other activities that you are already doing. Great anchors are brushing your teeth, putting your watch on in the morning and taking it off at night, a morning snack, lunch, an afternoon snack and bedtime teeth brushing. Connect your self-hypnosis to activities you do every day. If you hook it to going to work, you will do it Monday through Friday, but then miss the weekend.

If you’re the sort of person whose best intentions vanish into your daily tasks, then you might want to make one self- hypnosis minute mandatory as your very first action each day. That way you know you’ve gotten you day off to a great start. If you are working on eating suggestions, doing your light switch technique right before each meal can be effective in keeping your eating plan front and center in your thoughts.

Create reminders.

Sticky notes work great. I kept sticky notes in my Franklin Planner for two years before I realized I was doing it on my own. Don’t expect to retain this as a new behavior in just a few days or even weeks. One of the best reminder ideas I’ve heard from my clients is to put a sticky note for each hypnosis minute on the left side of your bathroom mirror and/or your computer monitor. Throughout the day as you do your self-hypnosis, move one note to the right side of your mirror or computer monitor. Some women use hoop bracelets. They will have five on one wrist at the beginning of the day and by the end of the day they are on the other wrist. Other possibilities are five buttons in a pocket or five pebbles on one side of your desk that you move to the other side. The bottom line is, find a reminder system that will work for you.

Be sure to practice your light switch technique in loud noisy places such as riding the bus, sitting in Starbucks or by turning on the TV and radio at the same time at home. (It’s okay to close your eyes in public. No one will notice, and if they do, they won’t care!) If you can only do this in a quiet place with soft music in a comfortable chair, then it’s not a functional tool. You want to be able to use self-hypnosis at work or in an airport. Sometimes the only place you can find to use your light switch is while sitting on the toilet—and I hear from moms with young children they may not even get to do that alone!

I recommend to my clients that they practice their light switch technique for seven days before adding in suggestions.
Becoming Slender For Life  pages 52 – 54

In the September 27, 2006 issue of Newsweek magazine, Dr. David Spiegel of Stanford University School of Medicine, wrote: “One of the interesting ironies about hypnosis is that old fantasy that it takes away control. It’s actually a way of enhancing people’s control, of teaching them how to control aspects of their body’s function and sensation that they thought they couldn’t.”

There are unlimited applications for hypnosis in self-improvement for both personal and business use. Ellen DeGeneres spoke on her talk show in 2006 about overcoming a long-standing cigarette addiction with hypnosis and in the December 31, 2006 Parade magazine, she said that hypnosis worked and she will continue using it. Professional, Olympic and collegiate athletes use hypnosis to enhance concentration and performance. More and more sports teams employ their own hypnotists and even provide training to their players in self-hypnosis techniques. Jan, a tri-athlete, successfully used hypnosis for style correction, speed and strength. She reported back to me that she exceeded her time goals.

The use of hypnosis in sports has been around for hundreds of years. In the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, the Russian Olympic team took no less than 11 hypnotists to develop mental clarity and help the athletes with visualization. In hypnosis it is possible to communicate with the unconscious mind in order to promote healing or even speed up a slow metabolism. You can use hypnosis to create new conditioned responses as well as to change your perceptions of things like food and exercise. Repeated reinforcement makes it last.

Hypnosis has proven applications in medicine, dentistry, psychology, obstetrics, counseling, law enforcement, habit management, pain control and in virtually every area of education. Major hospitals are now including hypnotherapists on their staffs.

Read Self-hypnosis

Check out Seattle hypnosis and Bainbridge Island hypnosis.
Call (206) 903-1232 or email for your free consultation.

Remember to sign up for your FREE 8-part audio course, Understanding Hypnosis, at the right side of this page NOW!

The Dallas Hypnosis Convention 2012 is April 19 – 21, and I am excited! I am especially excited about Saturday, April 21. I will be speaking 1:30-5:00, on “If It’s Not About The Food … Then What?”  There are countless diets available today and people can lose weight on most any diet.  Few people succeed in attaining their goal and maintaining that goal weight throughout their life.  Even people who have had stomach surgery struggle to keep the weight off and sometimes gain it back.  Diets don’t work and it’s not about the food!  If taking the weight off and keeping it off is not about the food then what is it all about?

“If It’s Not About The Food … Then What? “ will explore six mental and emotional roadblocks that keep people from losing the weight.

• Commitment:  What are the stages of change?
• Discomfort:  Food as a drug of choice.
• Inner Control:  After all of these failures, will I ever be successful?
• Perfectionism:  Since I’ve eaten the cookie I’ve blown the whole day.
• Secondary Gain:  This weight is protection?
• Stress Eating:  Coping with life.

Each of these roadblocks will be explored and methods of working with them will be offered.  Be more successful with your weight loss clients.  Find out how to ascertain your client’s roadblocks and offer them the tools to progress through these barriers so that they may take the weight off and keep it off.

The 2012 Dallas Hypnosis Convention

April 19-21, 2012 and April 22

This year’s convention will feature expert speakers that can provide you with tools for effective counseling, social work and clinical hypnotherapy. Here are just some of the highlights:

April 19: Medical Hypnotherapy with Michael Ellner and Richard Nongard. As healthcare reform takes shape in the next two years, you will want to be a part of the preventative care mandates. You will also learn processes and methods of pain control treatment, building immune response and integrating hypnotherapy into cancer treatment.

April 20: In addition to our annual Firewalk Dinner, held on Friday night, featured speakers will include Will Horton, Psy.D., William Mitchell, M.Div. and Kweethai Neill, Ph.D. We will also have 9 breakout sessions to choose from, all offering practical skills and CEU credit.

April 21: Steve G. Jones, Ed.S. will be a featured speaker, showing you how to increase students test taking performance using effective methods of clinical hypnosis. Roger Moore, will demonstrate tools for use in couples counseling and Richard Nongard will address Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction. Other featured speakers include Scott Sandland, and Melissa Roth.

April 22: Our Sunday morning post-convention workshops include three hours of professional ethics and a great program with John Cerbone.

We have many other featured speakers and topics, including Kevin Cole, John Clessattle and many others. You will want to be a part of the future of hypnotherapy by attending this convention.

You may attend one day, two days or all four days. CEU credit will be awarded each day for social workers, mental health professionals, and registered nurses.

You can find airfare discounts, hotel information and all of the details at www.HypnosisConvention.com

Saturday morning I will be talking about Hypnotically Enhanced Couples Communication in Counseling and how I utilize hypnosis in couples counseling to promote lasting change.

The Dallas Hypnosis Convention is a creation of Richard Nongard who brings new challenges and experiences to us everyday. Richard Nongard is also the creator of an exciting new web site Mindfulness Meditation (and on Facebook) – you want to check this out!

Check out Roger Moore’s Institute of Hypnotherapy
Call (206) 903-1232 or email for your free consultation.

Remember to sign up for your FREE 8-part audio course, Understanding Hypnosis, at the right side of this page NOW!

Are you ready to become an expert in changework and clinical hypnosis?

This seminar will prepare you to take your hypnotherapy practice to the next level. Both new and experienced hypnotherapists will benefit from this CEU approved educational conference. We have planned with care, to ensure that by the conclusion of this conference you will have practical skills and techniques you can utilize in your practice to really help client make lasting change.

• You will receive detailed course notes
• Complete therapeutic hypnotherapy scripts
• A resource DVD illustrating some of the most useful techniques shared in this conference
• Participants will also network with others and build lasting relationships with other professionals

Register Today and Save

The Process of Change – You will learn a model for intervention that can help even the most difficult clients move into a new preferred scenario. The process of change does not ignore the past, but focuses on the present and is based on the work of Gerard Egan. Regardless of your theoretical orientation or current set of skills, this process can move you towards success in professional hypnosis.

The Motivation of Change – Are your frustrated by clients who could achieve so much yet lack the motivation to change? Working with the clients initial frame of reference to assess motivations and identify the mechanism for utilizing these motivational trance states will help you move even the most difficult clients forward.

The Method of Change -You will learn specific methods of producing lasting change in hypnosis. You will receive printed scripts, watch techniques demonstrated by experts and have a chance to practice skills for change. You will learn the techniques and methods of hypnotic induction, integration of NLP patterns into traditional therapy and specific strategies for many different types of clients including methods for:

• Ending Obsession and Compulsion
• Treating Obesity as a Clinical Issue
• Arresting Addiction to Drugs, Alcohol and destructive behaviors
• Stopping Panic Attacks
• Overcoming Fear and Phobias
• ADD/ADHD and Impulsivity
• Stress related Medical Conditions

The Maintenance of Change – Once clients make a change, relapse prevention is an essential strategy. Our goal in effective hypnosis is to produce lasting change, and utilizing assessment tools and process of daily practice, clients who have experiences success can retain that success. This seminar will show you practical methods for doing exactly that.

Thursday night 6:00- 9:00
Interventions for Psychosexual Disorder Treatment

This event will focus on the role of the clinical hypnotist in working with individuals and couples experiencing a variety of impairing sexual problems. Clinical hypnosis is one of the most effective tools for enhancing couples intimacy and helping individuals function at maximum potential.

Friday-Saturday 9:00-5:00 each day
The Science of Change Conference

Covering specific interventions in depression, anxiety, and anger, coping strategies, weight loss and smoking cessation, altering subconscious life scripts, arresting compulsive behaviors, sex addiction, pathological gambling, impulsivity, health concerns and stress related medical disorders.

Your Presenters:
Richard Nongard, LMFT and Roger Moore, Ph.D. are two of the most dynamic and interesting instructors you could have. Both are popular authors, and frequent conference and keynote speakers. You will enjoy the relaxed and informal approach, but benefit from the quality of material being shared. You will be learning from clinicians actually doing the work of day-to-day counseling and clinical hypnosis.

Click here to register for
The Science of Change

This event will be held near downtown Seattle, just a few blocks from the Space Needle and area attractions. You will enjoy your time in Seattle, seeing one of America’s great cities and participating in a great conference. Special room rates are available for participants.

You do not need previous hypnosis training or experience
to learn and benefit from this conference.

Check out Roger Moore’s Institute of Hypnotherapy
Call (206) 903-1232 or email for your free consultation.

Remember to sign up for your FREE 8-part audio course, Understanding Hypnosis, at the right side of this page NOW!

Obesity and It’s
Mental Health Complications…
LEARN THE SOLUTIONS!

DALLAS

February 9-10, 2012 (Thursday-Friday)
8:30am-5pm = 14 CEUs

Obesity complicates & causes emotional disorders, disease and family functioning. Help your clients end the cycle of obesity & addiction to food.

Join us in Dallas, February 9-10, 2012 & learn how to apply the research-based techniques of effective therapy in counseling obese clients.

Two full days of practical training, only $259! (when pre-registered) Earn 14 hours at this live event. Participants who complete additional coursework can earn certification as a Certified Bariatric Counseling Specialist.

Find Permanent Solutions to Obesity
& it’s Mental Health Complications

Taught by Richard Nongard and Roger Moore

Click Here to Learn More about becoming a Bariatric Hypnosis Specialist

Professionals in private practice can increase revenue by offering all-cash weight loss treatment services.

Weight-loss experts find increased opportunity in medical settings, fitness centers and corporate consulting.

Check out Roger Moore’s Institute of Hypnotherapy
Call (206) 903-1232 or email for your free consultation.

Remember to sign up for your FREE 8-part audio course, Understanding Hypnosis, at the right side of this page NOW!

Mesmer's Hypnosis Tub - 1784

Understanding hypnosis and trance is important for dispelling the fears of hypnocontrol have been perpetuated by the media for a long time. George Du Maurier (1834-1896) wrote a novel, Trilby, about hypnocontrol. In the novel, Svengali, a character, used cruel domination of his hapless hypnotic suspect. In fact, in the late 19th century, both natural split personalities and artificial personality splitting (by suggested amnesia under hypnosis) were hot new items in psychological research. The unknowing young female in the novel was subjected to such artificially-split personality. The continuance of this myth has carried on in recent movies about vampires and a relatively recent Woody Allen movie where the character was induced by hypnosis to burglarize homes. Unfortunately for the public, these myths have greatly hurt the reputation of hypnotherapists. Fortunately today, hypnosis is becoming known world-wide for its professional use in medical clinics and hospitals. People are learning self-hypnosis and igniting their power to heal.

Show #21: Understanding Hypnosis & Trance

Learn more about hypnosis – what it is and what it isn’t, with Dr. Tim Brunson, DCH and Dr. Roger Moore, PhD. Hear some of the many uses of self-hypnosis and possibilities for the future of hypnotherapy. Read Understanding Hypnosis & Trance with Dr. Tim Brunson & Dr. Roger Moore.

Show #21: Understanding Hypnosis & Trance

I feel truly blest to be able to teach people self-hypnosis in my Seattle hypnosis and Bainbridge Island hypnosis offices as well as at wellness programs like the Peninsula Cancer Center, Gilda’s Club of Seattle, Pierce County Cancer Survivorship Conference and Health First Fitness in Forks. Learn hypnosis and ignite your power to heal.

Check out Seattle hypnosis and Bainbridge Island hypnosis.
Call (206) 903-1232 or email for your free consultation.

Remember to sign up for your FREE 8-part audio course, Understanding Hypnosis, at the right side of this page NOW!