Are You Sabotaging Yourself?

Have you ever found yourself really wanting to do something, but you’re too embarrassed to admit it for fear of ridicule. So you end up making excuses to convince yourself and others that you’re not really bothered?

I’m remember doing this to myself many moons ago when I began to study Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy, a colleague said to me “Hey, wouldn’t it be really cool to perform Hypnosis like Paul McKenna or Derren Brown?”. My response to this was something along the lines that I wasn’t really bothered.

I really did want to perform the kind of things that McKenna and Brown did as I admired them for their skill and delivery as performers. But somewhere in my mind I was saying “What if I couldn’t do it?” and the answers to this question provoked lots of pictures of me failing and lots of people laughing at me, causing me to feel an inner tightness as the potential embarrassment washed through my body.

The key here is to face up to the core problem, which in my case was not failure of not being able to perform these techniques but the ensuing feeling of embarrassment.

So in order for me to achieve my goal, I had to find a better way to deal with feeling embarrassed, or certainly to acknowledge it and prevent it from making me start trembling, sweating and blushing.

The first thing I did was relax by breathing diaphragmatically, breathing in through my nose, down to the bottom two thirds of my lungs by pushing out my stomach (rather than lifting my chest and shoulders), holding the breath for a moment and fully exhaling through my mouth. This triggers your parasympathetic nervous system and calms the body producing by producing chemicals that relax the whole body and mind. I recommend you learn and practise this technique; you could do a Google search or even by a book on relaxation?

The next thing I did was to relax my posture by sitting back to release any muscle tension and then began saying positive affirmations to myself. I began with “I can do this” and created pictures (and movies) in my mind of lots of other occasions where I had overcome adversity to succeed and thought of the feelings I felt afterwards.

Give it a go…now…think of a time you overcame something to achieve a positive result. Close your eyes, remember it as if you were really there, what could you see? What could you hear? What did you say to yourself? How good did you feel? And notice how much better you feel afterwards…

For those of you who were interested, I did become a very good Hypnotist and Mind Magician very quickly and perform regularly at parties and social functions. Do I get nervous? Yes! Do I have the tools to control this? Yes, and now so do you!