3 Elements To Moving Forward
Jim feels a slightly nauseous feeling in his stomach thinking about next Thursday night. It’s the night of his weekly networking group. It’s an essential event he must attend to move forward with his new business. However, the thought of going fills him with dread, anxiety, and fear.
He feels vulnerable and exposed. He has this fear of introducing himself and being rejected that he can’t explain. The fear comes with a memory of him at school as a child. The other children are laughing at him in the memory. He imagines himself arriving at the event, being too anxious to socialize, and leaving with no new leads. Just like it happened the last three times he went.
Moving Forward From Being Stuck
Jim has social anxiety and is stuck. He’s trapped in a behavioral loop. He is trying to move forward, but he can’t get past a subconscious block. It’s like he is hitting a wall when it comes to progressing socially. He doesn’t know how to get past it. It feels like he is fighting his mind.
If you’ve ever been in a position similar to Jim’s, you probably understand his frustration. None of us have ever been given a manual for our minds. Being in a position where your mind is fighting against you is hard. It can feel like you are powerless.
However, it doesn’t have to continue to be like this. Hypnotherapists are experts in working with the subconscious mind to overcome these types of blocks. Today, I will share the 3 keys that we use to move someone forward into the future.
1. Moving Forward From the Past
The first key to moving forward is resolving the past. Just like the Christmas Carol started its transformation of Ebenezer Scrooge with the Ghost of Christmas Past, hypnotherapists do the same.
Jim has social anxiety, because of an event in childhood where he learned something about himself. He learned that putting himself out there with people can result in being laughed at or rejected. This is the meaning he took from the event. This is why the memory of the childhood event plays in his head when he feels fear.
To become free of our blocks in the present, we must first resolve their cause in the past.
Negative Emotions Are Meant To Move To Positive Emotions
The point of our emotional experiences is to teach us important lessons about what we like and don’t like in our environment. We move from a negative emotional state to a positive one when we implement these lessons.
If our subconscious mind fills us with fear of not being prepared for a test, studying and preparing moves us to a state of confidence. When we feel sadness and loneliness, taking action to be around people replaces it with happiness and serenity. If we feel bad because someone criticizes our work, we either implement the criticism to prevent it from happening again or we learn to process it from their viewpoint and not take it personally.
Sometimes We Don’t Resolve Negative Emotions and Can’t Move Forward
However, sometimes, usually, during childhood, we have an event happen where we don’t fully take the proper lessons. We don’t resolve the event completely and thus, it remains negative in our minds. We can’t move forward with it weighing us down.
In the case of Jim, he learned as a child that introducing himself to other people will always result in a negative happening. Instead of learning that sometimes people are immature, having a bad day, or feeling threatened or intimidated, he internalized his bad social experiences as meaning something about him. Thus, in his mind, strangers in social situations are always negative.
I help clients overcome these kinds of old events by regressing them back to the unresolved event while under hypnosis. During this process, the body begins to experience the event as if it was happening. This allows the client to finish discharging the negative emotion and reframe the beliefs they took in the past. Once this process is completed, the old emotion stops coming up, because the mind now regards the event as over and resolved.
2. Moving Forward Into the Future
In the Christmas Carol, they move from the past into the present. However, my approach is a little bit different. I understand before you can begin to take action in the present, the mind needs to know what your future is.
One of the key principles of the subconscious mind is it’s constantly projecting its internal emotional state onto the external world. What we imagine, think about, and feel is the world we manifest with our choices and actions. Even if you resolve the trauma of the past, you will still have difficulty if you approach the present with uncertainty and doubt about the future.
So to successfully move forward into the future you want, you have to live in a mindset where you already have the future you want.
To Manifest the Future You Want, You Have To Create It Internally
Jim needs to create a future where he sees himself socializing with people easily and effortlessly. He hears himself talking and laughing while the people he is with a laugh and have a good time as well. He feels confidence and relaxation as he moves from person to person, introducing himself charmingly.
I help people create these kinds of futures by taking them into hypnosis and guiding them through creating it in their minds. We engage all five senses and then go deeper into hypnosis, so they experience the imagined future as if they are there. We then bind that internal experience to a word or action such as squeezing the finger.
This is called an anchor. It allows the client to easily access this internal state by saying the word or completing the action. This aids them in helping to maintain this internal state in the present.
3. Moving Toward the Present
Jim’s had a few sessions with me, working on resolving his limiting beliefs. We’ve worked on creating the internal state of the future he wishes to have. Now, the final step is to take action.
Taking action is a necessary part of change work. As hypnotherapists, we work on building the start of the neuro-architecture in a person’s subconscious mind. Moving forward and taking actual action is what finishes the neuro-architecture. The experiences of pursuing the goal or participating in the event are what transform you into the person living the reality you’ve created in your mind.
Maintaining Your Internal State Takes You Forward
The goal is to maintain your internal state while taking action to create the reality you desire. As long as Jim is in the state where is already the socially successful networker, then he will make all the subconscious decisions necessary to make that a reality. However, maintaining your internal state in the present is a skill you have to work at and train at.
Even after resolving the main limiting beliefs preventing someone from moving forward, it’s still normal for things to happen while taking action which triggers more emotions from the past. It’s common to have several follow-up sessions with a client to resolve more limitations that appear during the process of doing.
Despite doing internal work in the past, I still teach my clients several tools for breathing into emotions, discharging trauma in the moment, and shifting themselves back into their desired state. With enough practice and enough work on old belief structures while taking action and while staying in the desired internal state, the client eventually begins to live in that state all the time without help from me.
If you found this post helpful, you might enjoy these posts on self-sabotage and laziness, and procrastination.
