4 Essential Keys to Building Your Practice

4 Essential Keys to Building Your Practice

4 keys backed by research
…and how you can use them to increase your practice.

Motivation is powerful. It predicts success better than intelligence, ability, or salary.

Here are 4 keys to finding and maintaining motivation that will help you to increase your practice, and help your clients to sustain the inspiration and motivation they need to realize their goals.

KEY #1

Find what you love about your work.

Over the lifetime of your practice, you need to find the rewards that deeply satisfy you. Intrinsic rewards-like the good feeling you get from helping your clients, and the satisfaction you get from having a good income- will sustain you over time. Extrinsic rewards work for the short term.

Try this: Intrinsic rewards include self-interest. Find three reasons to have a successful practice that are clear and potent- things you love about practicing hypnotherapy.

KEY #2

Emotion trumps logic.

Motivation is about change, and change happens mostly by speaking to people’s feelings. You can think about a full practice until you turn blue- it’s when you can feel it that it transforms you.

Try this: Ask yourself, “ What is the most powerful (positive) thing you could be feeling to increase your motivation?” When you’ve discovered what this is, settle into a deep, quiet state, and imagine that feeling. Make it stronger. Do this on a daily basis, immersing yourself in the good feelings you’re cultivating.

KEY #3

No failure- only feedback.

Failures are a natural part of embracing challenge- and beginning a new career certainly qualifies.

Each time you try a new induction, try a new advertising idea, or work with a client, you learn something important about the art of being a hypnotherapist. That experience is what makes you good at what you do, including the ones that didn’t go as well as you wanted. Learn to use that feedback as a guide to improving your work, both as a practitioner, and as a business person without beating yourself up. Mistakes are human. They are natural.

Failures become a problem only if you don’t learn from them, or if you give them to the Inner Critic, who attacks your character and worth rather than helping you to understand how to use the information to do better next time. Focus on insights that you can take action on.

KEY #4

Celebrate progress.

Nothing is more motivating than progress.

Rick Hansen, the neurobiologist, speaks about our brains being velcro for negative events and teflon for positive events. Our brains are wired to attend to bad things, so that we can avoid them in the future.

This is very helpful if you’re a cave person who just ate some poisonous berries, but not so good if you’re motivating yourself to increase your hypnotherapy practice. If you focus on what’s not going well, you won’t be giving yourself what you need to change. If you take time to focus on what’s working, and to celebrate that, you’ll grow new pathways in your brain, and over time, your attention will naturally move towards what’s going well.

Comparing people who tend to give up easily with people who tend to carry on, even through difficult challenges, researchers find that persistent people spend twice as much time thinking, not about what has to be done, but about what they have already accomplished, the fact that the task is doable, and that they are capable of it. – Sparrow 1998

Progress contains imporant information. It builds your confidence and allows you to experience more enjoyment and satisfaction.

Persistent people spend twice as long thinking about past accomplishments and their ability to accomplish a future task than less persistent people. -Sparrow 1998

Focusing on progress inspires you to keep moving forward.

Try this: Each day, do something for your practice- and yourself- that you feel good about. Instead of focusing on what you could have done better, or what you wish you had, take a few moments to appreciate something you’ve done well. Use all of your senses to reexperience the goodness in your day. Really appreciate your efforts, and your successes.