If you’ve had any interest in personal growth or overcoming personal life challenges, it’s highly likely you’ve read self help books or been to workshops or perhaps seen individual practitioners or therapists.  Here’s my take on some of the the commonly missing ingredients with what is currently available ‘out there’.

1. WHY …. you know why you have the problem but you still have the problem!

Therapy in particular, often focusses heavily on WHY you have a problem.  Delving back in time to understand what happened.  It also give you many coping strategies and life skills which are very valuable.  However, in most cases it is ill-equipped to show you how to actually fix the problem (have you noticed the numbers being quoted of people on anti-depressants?).

Why is irrelevant.

The important thing to know is ‘how are you doing the problem?’, and then ‘how to do it differently’.  Not why.

Your problems exist because there is a positive intention behind the problem.  It is not bad.  It is serving a purpose.  It is keeping you safe.  The opportunity then is, to understand how you are ‘generating’ the problem so successfully with your mental and emotional processes, and then, change it to a set of processes that generate what you actually want.  This is the fundamentally effective approach taken by FasterEFT and Clinical Hypnotherapy.

Therapy is incredibly valuable and important.  A number of therapists are now adding these methods to their practices.  Yet this is still the minority.

2. One Size Fits All – It’s not uniquely tailored to you

Personal growth books, seminars and courses are one-size-fits all and throw a bunch of tools, techniques, internal explorations and exercises at you, but don’t cater for your own unique situation (and if you read the book did you even do the exercises?!).  Now in yoga, you did your exercises, yet you are expected to twist and stretch and struggle in to poses along with twenty other people whose bodies are completely different to yours.

You are a unique combination of all sorts of things. Experiences, skills, passions, beliefs, and desires and working with a practitioner one-on-one is the best way to work with your own uniqueness and make the changes that really work for you.

3. Where’s the support?  It’s lonely out there in space

There’s no support and accountability.

On our own we often don’t do what works.  That’s why coaches are becoming so popular because they are in your corner and they hold you accountable.  I often think back to the intense deadlines at school and university, and in my more recent past, at work.  So many things would just not have ever happened if it weren’t for someone giving me a deadline and breathing down my neck over it!  Yes, there are definitely moments where I am so inspired that I don’t need anything from anyone, yet, most of the time, accountability works.   Can you recall how good it was when there was someone in your corner cheering you on?

4. It’s Targeting The Wrong Brain

Goal setting and measurable steps so common at work and in most personal growth forums use your rational conscious mind.  Whilst most growth processes and coaches are great at focusing you in on your goals and moving you forward, they are missing the part of your brain where it all really happens…..

….. Your unconscious (or sub-concious) mind.  This is the part of the brain that has proven most challenging to make long and lasting change, and much of it is hard wired by the time you are seven years of age.

Try this.  If I ask you to breathe in for five seconds and out for five seconds for the next half an hour, how long do you think you could do it?  How long would it take until those rogue thoughts about your to do list, what that person thought about your input in that meeting today, what’s for dinner…. etc etc were commandeering your conscious brain? Aha.  And … that five second breathing thing?  Thanks to your unconscious mind, your breathing miraculously continued without you even having to think consciously about it …. on auto-pilot.

It’s much the same with many goals in your life, especially the emotional ones, like weight loss and money.  When you focus your conscious attention on them (eat less, exercise more…. spend less, save more), you move toward your goal.  Yet, when you take your attention off it and focus elsewhere, often times the gains you made disappear (and then some!).

Your unconscious mind is driving your bus.  Doing affirmations 500 times a day for months, may work eventually (once you feel they are true) but there is a much faster way.

5. Focussing solely on the positive yet ignoring the negativity that’s keeping you stuck

Louise Hay put it beautifully.  In an interview with Nick Ortner, she mentioned that ‘you can’t plant a beautiful garden of flowers on a bed of weeds.’  You have to pull the weeds first (they are planted in your unconscious mind).  THEN you can plant the beautiful flowers (positive thoughts, productive actions).  If your mind is full of memories, perceptions, thoughts and emotions that are negative and dis-empowering, change becomes very hard and full of effort.  Change your mind (at the unconscious level) first.

It’s actually so very simple, and I can show you how to do it, gently, elegantly, and powerfully.

Find out How You Can Love Yourself This Year

Work one on one with me to overcome your feelings of unworthiness, stop the critical and judgemental self-talk, stop worrying what others think of you, and discover how you can feel wonderful about yourself again.

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