Is your self-confidence holding you back from moving forward in life? From achieving your true potential in your work or personal life, or stopping you from even trying? And if you do try, you find you put yourself down all the time?
You're not alone there.
That negative voice in your head is low self-esteem, and it's something the majority of people will deal with from time to time. But when the ideal is healthy self-esteem and confidence, trying to navigate through low self-esteem and feel better about yourself can be incredibly difficult. Especially without help. Hypnotherapy is one of the most successful methods out there for managing and overcoming low self-esteem and getting you feeling confident and good about yourself.
The Impact of Low Self-Esteem
Self-Esteem is essentially a state of mind. It's having faith in yourself, believing in yourself, your abilities, your talents and your strengths. It's accepting yourself for who you are, and projecting that out into the world. When you have positive self-esteem, you come across as confident, which can have all sorts of positive knock-on effects in your life. It gives you more credibility in your career, helps you make a good first impression, improves your ability to deal with pressure and tackle challenges as they come at you. It puts people at ease, making relationships of all types that little bit easier.
But when we have low self-esteem, there can be just as many negative effects. Having a low view of ourselves can make it difficult to recognise our own strengths, see what we're good at and progress in life. It can hold you back, stop you from trying new things, and keep you very firmly lodged in your comfort zone. It's also not good for your mental health, and low self-esteem has often been liked to stress, burnout, depression and anxiety. When it's difficult to show yourself love and care, it becomes difficult to do other things too.
Self-esteem can be impacted by a lot of things in your life, all of which create thought patterns in your subconscious designed to keep your safe. For example, you might struggle with maths, and you got a bad grade on one of your maths exams in school. Your mind then creates these negative thoughts around the subject, repeating them every time it comes up until they are automatic. Your subconscious will try to protect you from the negative feelings by telling you you're bad at maths and that you shouldn't even try - creating a different kind of negative thought pattern for you to deal with. Over time this can have a huge impact on your confidence and it can follow you through to adulthood. I've worked with many clients who are wary of doing anything to do with numbers, including handling their finances properly, due to this exact thing.
Reprogramming Your Subconscious
One of the main reasons hypnotherapy is such an effective tool for low self-esteem and confidence in particular is that it works directly with the subconscious mind. By guiding you into a focused state of attention or 'trance' through guided relaxation, we are able to work with that deeper part of your mind where the negative thoughts about yourself lie. These negative thoughts are often just your subconscious trying to protect you and they happen automatically, but they are incredibly unhelpful for your mental health and self-esteem. And because these negative thoughts are so buried in our brains, it can be incredibly difficult to change them through sheer willpower. The subconscious mind doesn't listen to reason, and it's rather stuck in its ways!
Hypnotherapy And Low Self-Esteem
Luckily, hypnotherapy and the subconscious get on very well. In Solution Focused Hypnotherapy we combine positive talking therapy with hypnosis, this approach builds on your strengths and allows you to visualise how you want things to be in the future whilst supporting you to take small practical steps forward, so you feel better about yourself and more confident.
We then consolidate sessions with hypnosis which allows us to talk directly to your subconscious mind to help you change those negative thoughts patterns into more positive ones. In that deeply relaxed state, I'll make suggestions that will help you by starting to transform your inner voice from one of criticism to one of encouragement and support.
It's always worth remembering that hypnotherapy is not a magic wand, it's a collaborative process which often requires several sessions and works to help you reprogramme the way you think at a very fundamental level, a fantastic therapeutic tool that helps you create the positive changes you want in a relatively short period of time.
Low self-esteem can be a struggle, but change is possible. If you'd like to boost your self-esteem and confidence, I would love to help. Start by getting in touch to book a free initial chat so that we can explore your situation, provide some advice, and explore what your personalised treatment plan might look like.
Feel free to book an initial chat or get in touch to ask for advice or ask questions