An individual made an appointment with me for a hypnosis session. In my hypnotherapy practice I see people on a wide range of presenting complaints. Hypnotherapy is effective for so many behavioral problems; anxiety, phobias, panic attacks, to stop smoking, to lose weight, for marital and relationship issues, public speaking, to improve sports, sales or stage performance and to find out how to stop sabotaging one’s self. This person came into my office, sat down and blurted “I’m burned out”. My reply was “Then why are you here? When you say you’re burned out, you mean it’s over, there’s nothing more that can be done.” “Burned out means ruined beyond repair. It’s finished. Failure is inevitable. You’ve surrendered. You’ve succumbed.” I said to the individual that “burned out is an already accomplished state of mind. When he spoke the words “I’m burned out”, he spoke in the past tense. His words suggested he would fight no more. I explained that he probably had been carrying a huge load far too long. He was exhausted mentally, spiritually and physically. There had been too much going wrong for too long. But those are temporary setbacks and can still be overcome. But declaring that one is “burned out” is final.

Scorched, on the other hand isn’t final. It’s not pleasant, it’s undesirable and uncomfortable, but it’s not final. Things are rebuildable. The problems may be tough to bear, but they aren’t unbearable. There’s time to turn things around. No one wants to carry a negative load of frustration and disappointment, but the alternative is quitting. Giving up and laying down to die.

We have two minds, the conscious or thinking mind and the subconscious mind which is by far the more powerful. Besides housing our autonomic nervous system which controls our breathing, eye blinking, heartbeat, digestion and other non thinking systems; the subconscious mind is where we find our personality, our memory, our moods, our behavior, our habits and our two “on board” problem solvers, our imagination and our creativity.

When animals sense danger, they freeze, flee or fight. Deer often freeze in the headlights and the rabbit you surprise in your backyard flees. But here’s something that’s interesting, the deer can choose to flee and the rabbit can choose to freeze. But you can choose to fight!

When humans are confronted with a problem, uncertainly in their future or a huge disappointment, the common reflex is stress. The stress reflex blocks the subconscious mind’s two greatest problem solvers; imagination and creativity from functioning. Stressing ruins our vision and makes it become myopic.

Through hypnotherapy you can reprogram your cognitive maps, and with hypnosis, one can learn to reflex to a calmness and confidence instead of stress, thereby leaving the channels open for our creativity and imagination to flow on their highest plain. When one is calm, one sees with clarity and focus. Through our imagination and creativity we can solve our problems.

It’s okay to occasionally allow yourself to be temporarily overwhelmed and even scorched around the edges; but never burnt out. Call Bob Crow for a complimentary interview session to discuss appropriating this power in your own life.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 20th, 2009 at 6:06 pm and is filed under General, Hypnosis, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.