Hypnotherapy for confidence
Confidence is flexible. It can change you aren’t doomed to a life of low self-confidence. It’s possible to build your confidence.
Suffering from a lack of confidence can affect all areas of your life. However, building your confidence can improve all areas of your life.
When you’re lacking confidence, you can find yourself running away from your past, from what others think, and from anything else that threatens your sense of self.
When you have high self-confidence, you’re moving toward the life you want.
What are the benefits of using hypnotherapy to treat confidence?
Confidence is a state of mind. When we feel confident, we accept ourselves and believe in our abilities. If you feel you could benefit from building your confidence, hypnotherapy is a safe and effective way to make a positive, long-lasting change.
Hypnotherapy is very effective at making changes to your state of mind, dealing with negative thoughts, changing limiting beliefs and creating more useful thinking styles.
Benefits of hypnotherapy:
- allows access to subconscious processes
- allows you to regress and change learnt beliefs and behaviours
- allows you to mental rehearse situations you where don’t feel confident
- allows access to creative solutions
- reduces unhelpful automatic, subconscious processes
- empowers you to manage your emotions
- enables you to develop a better sense of self-efficacy
Does hypnotherapy work for confidence?
Hypnotherapy has been found to be effective in building confidence in public speaking, sports performance and other activities.
- In 2010, a study assessing the immediate and maintained effects of hypnosis on self-efficacy and soccer wall-volley performance, suggest that hypnosis can be used to enhance self-efficacy, affect, and sport performance.
- A 2017 study, “Self-Hypnosis Training to Improve Self Confidence in Students for Speaking in Public” concluded self-hypnosis helped university students feel more confident when speaking in public
How does hypnotherapy work for low confidence?
Hypnotherapy for confidence helps challenge negative thought processes and limiting beliefs and can eliminate self-doubt allowing you to generate a more positive future, improving self-image and increasing determination.
Hypnosis makes changes to your subconscious mind
Some people, think they are great at what they do, despite other people telling them otherwise. Some people, lack confidence in their abilities despite constant reassurance. This is because your subconscious mind holds a set of beliefs about you and what you are capable of. These beliefs are difficult to change, reassurance from other people doesn’t work. You need to make changes to the beliefs about yourself and your abilities at the subconscious, by using hypnosis and techniques that work at a subconscious level. Hypnotherapy can improve confidence, as the beliefs that drive how confident you feel, live in your subconscious, hypnotherapy makes changes to your subconscious mind; You can use hypnotherapy to build you self-esteem and confidence.
Dealing with negative thoughts
Your inner voice can feel like your biggest critic, causing you to feel bad about yourself, your thoughts, or your actions. But it is possible to overcome your negative thoughts, no matter how deeply embedded they may seem. Hypnosis can help to change your subconscious mind and help you to yourself in a kinder light. As well as being able to help improve your confidence, hypnosis can help improve your self-belief around specific areas, such as in work or relationships, or to boost your confidence around a specific goal such as taking a driving test or giving a presentation.
Hypnosis can change limiting beliefs
Hypnotherapy can help you recognize limiting beliefs about yourself, and change negative limited beliefs to positive beliefs, increasing your self-confidence. Including:
- Beliefs about how you look (self-image)
- Beliefs about your worth (self-worth)
- Beliefs about how you feel about yourself (self-esteem)
- Beliefs about your ability to carry out tasks and roles.
Hypnosis helps you face your fears
When certain situations trigger fear and anxiety, we tend to avoid them. And that can negatively impact your confidence. Hypnosis helps get to dela with and release your fears.
Hypnosis can help you to change unhelpful thinking habits
We tend to develop unhelpful thinking habits such as being too self-critical. Once identified you become more aware of unhelpful thinking patterns. Enabling you to challenge/change/distance yourself from the unhelpful thoughts and see the situation in a more helpful way.
Hypnotherapy techniques for confidence
Ego-strengthening suggestions (ego-boosting)
Focusing on positive aspects of yourself or your life can reduce stress and anxiety and improve confidence and self-esteem. Recalling things, you have achieved, focusing on challenges you’ve overcome and the skills you are developed.
Cognitive Reframing:
Cognitive reframing is used so you’re able to look at a situation, person, or relationship from a slightly different perspective. It can be helpful if you are caught in a negative, limiting thought pattern.
The idea behind reframing is that the frame through which a person views a situation determines their point-of-view. When that frame is shifted, the meaning changes and thinking and behaviour often change along with it. Like the picture seen through the lens of a camera can be changed to a view that is closer or further away. By slightly changing what is seen in the camera, the picture and the story it suggests changes.
Systematic desensitization
Systematic desensitization is based on the principle of classical conditioning. A hierarchical list of all the things that you do not feel confident doing, is created and ordered with the easy to achieve at the bottom of the list and the most difficult at the top. You practice overcoming the first item at the bottom of the list (the easiest to overcome) and then work your way up the list as you overcome more and more situations. Each achievement builds confidence. The exposure is done either by recreating the anxious situation in real life (In vivo) or imagining the situation (In vitro).
Visualisation
Being able to visual yourself feeling confident, achieving in anxious situations you didn’t believe you could achieve. As your mind mental rehearses the situations, you become more confident and make difficult situations less daunting.
Future pacing
Future pacing turns the problem around. Instead of focusing on the problem (your lack of confidence) the focus is on the solution (how you will feel when you feel confident). You imagine how life would be with confidence. From there you work backwards and analyse what would need to change to reach this solution.
Self-compassion
When our confidence is low, it can be difficult to be kind to yourself. Self-compassion is a practice of developing the habit of being kind to yourself.
Anchoring
When two separate events happen together enough number of times such that one of the events happening reminds you of the other, the events are said to be anchored in your mind. The classical conditioning of Pavlov’s dogs is the simplest and the most famous example of anchoring.
Recalling positive emotions/feelings and the creating an anchor for that resource, enable you to trigger those emotions/feelings whenever you want.
What happens in a hypnotherapy session for confidence?
All treatments and therapeutic sessions are centred on your needs at that time. Although individualised to you, a typical course of hypnosis treatment for confidence will often include an initial assessment, several hypnosis sessions, and follow-up and support.
During the initial assessment a person may be asked questions such as:
- What situations trigger a lack of confidence?
- What does confidence feel like to you?
- How would your life be different if you were more confident and self-assured?
Working together we will then set achievable goals and formulate a plan to improve your self-esteem.
During the sessions, you will be guided into a hypnotic trance, and several therapeutic techniques may be applied. Some session may not require hypnosis, depending on what we are working on at that time.
What is confidence?
Confidence is a state of mind. When you feel confident, you trust in yourself, accept yourself and believe in your abilities. Self-confidence doesn’t mean you think you’re always going to do thing well, but you know you’ll be fine when you don’t. When you’re self-confident, you’re not afraid to make mistakes, because you know that you can learn from them.
Self-confidence is an inner strength, a self-assuredness. It doesn’t necessarily mean being the loudest person in the room. You can be quiet or reserved and still be self-confident.
The difference between self-esteem and self-confidence
Self-confidence and self-esteem are usually linked; however, they are not the same thing. Self-confidence refers to the way you feel about your ability to carry out tasks and roles. Self-esteem refers to the way you feel about yourself – the way you look, behave, and think.
Those with low self-esteem generally have low self-confidence too. However, you can have low self-esteem and have confidence in certain areas.
Having confidence in your abilities does not mean doing everything perfectly. A part of having self-confidence is knowing that you can make mistakes, and how to deal with problems when they occur.
How many hypnosis sessions are needed to treat confidence issues?
The number of hypnotherapy sessions required for lasting change is different for everyone. Whilst Hypnotherapy is not a magic wand, it does help you create positive change in a relatively short period of time. How long it takes to see results from hypnotherapy can vary based your individual goals and personal circumstances. Typically for anxiety and stress related issues, a minimum of 4 – 8 sessions are required to benefit.
Types of confidence
Self-confidence
Your belief in your abilities.
Self-efficacy
Your belief in your abilities in certain situations. For example, you may be confident in social situations but lack confidence in public speaking.
Illusory Superiority
Illusory superiority is the tendency to view yourself as above average in certain areas. This can also be described as seeing yourself in an optimistic light and others in a pessimistic light.
Illusory Inferiority
The tendency to view yourself as below average in certain areas.
Illusion of Control
Confidence that you can control things that are in fact beyond your control. For example, a gambler who believes they influence results that are random.
Pessimism
A tendency to underestimate the probability of positive outcomes, to focus more on the things that go wrong and negativity. This results in low confidence in
Defeatism
Defeatism is believing that something will fail, often ensuring that fail will happen. For example, an employee who has no confidence in a strategy such that they fail to support it, ensuring that it will fail.
Optimism
Optimism is a tendency to underestimate how difficult or risky something is. It also results in an underestimation of potential problems.
Overconfidence
Overconfidence is a tendency to overestimate your abilities. You can be either optimism or pessimism and still be overconfident. For example, a pessimist can be overconfident that a conservative approach is best, an optimist can be overconfident that a risky approach is best.
Arrogance
Arrogance is overconfidence that exaggerates your worth, an attitude of superiority, often resulting in being overbearing.
What causes a lack of confidence?
A lack of confidence can also come from growing up in a society where your achievements determine your worth. Or it can come from media that gives you the impression that perfection is the norm.
Other factors include:
Your genes
Your genes, cultural background, childhood experiences, and other circumstances can all affect your confidence. Although you can’t change the experiences in your past, you can change your thoughts and expectations to gain more confidence.
Your genes affect the amount of certain confidence-boosting chemicals your brain can access. Your genes can increase or decrease two neurotransmitters, Serotonin (associated with happiness) and oxytocin (associated with empathy, trust, sexual activity, and relationship-building). Somewhere between 25 to 50 percent of the personality traits linked to confidence may be inherited.
Trauma.
Physical, sexual, and emotional abuse can all significantly affect our feelings of self-worth, which in turn affect your confidence.
Parenting style.
The way you were treated in your family can affect your confidence. For example, having parents who constantly belittled you, compared you to others, or told you that you would never achieve anything.
Bullying.
Bullying can affect your confidence. Humiliating experiences, including workplace harassment or a peer group that disrespects or belittles you, can also make you less willing to speak up for yourself or pursue ambitious goals.
Gender, race, and sexual orientation.
Women are socialized to worry more about how they’re perceived and, therefore, to take fewer risks. Racial and cultural background and sexual orientation can make a difference, too. If you’ve been on the receiving end of discrimination, you may have internalized some negative, untrue messages about your potential and whether you “belong.”
Thinking style
Lack of self-confidence can come from not knowing the “rules” of the confidence game. For example, if we think we must feel confident to act confidently, we set ourselves up for failure.
Perfectionism is another form of faulty thinking that contributes to low self-confidence. If we believe we must have something all figured out before we act, those thoughts can keep us from doing the things we value. Even learning and understanding what confidence is and isn’t a big step toward boosting it.
The effects of Low Self-Confidence
If you suffer with low self-confidence may find yourself paralyzed with indecision. You feel that you are unable to take risks because you don’t believe they’ll make the right decisions. This can lead to a lack of initiative in the workplace and frustration from partners, friends, and family members.
You may be extremely self-consciousness and very sensitive to criticism. This can lead you to try to always be in control or always put others first.
You are more likely to might avoid any activity where there is a risk of being judged, or you may feel that they don’t deserve to relax or enjoy yourself. It’s also possible that you may not take good care of yourself by not getting enough rest/sleep, not eating in a healthy way, and not exercising. They may also drink excessively or use drugs.
Two key areas that are affected by low confidence: Your career and relationships.
- Your career – When you have low self-confidence it can affect you at work, stopping you from speaking up, asserting yourself and being ambitious.
- Your relationships – Lacking confidence also affects your relationships with friends, family and partners. It may hold you back from meeting people or cause you to withdraw socially.
If you feel you could benefit from building your confidence, hypnotherapy is a safe and effective way to make a positive, long-lasting change.
Even though you didn’t cause your low self-confidence, you can be the one to fix it. Hypnosis is a rewarding, accessible way to build self-confidence, and self-esteem, regardless of what caused these negative traits in the first place.
Recognising low confidence
If you suffer from low confidence you may experience:
Imposter Syndrome:
Imposter syndrome is the experience of feeling like a phony—you feel like you don’t belong and worry that you are going to be found out as a fraud. It can affect anyone no matter their social status, work background, skill level, or degree of expertise.
Rebellion:
Rebellion is where you pretend that you don’t care what others think of you.
Victimhood:
Victimhood is believing that, no matter want you do you are helpless; a victim. You often rely on others to save or guide you and may use self-pity to avoid changing your situation.
Self-criticism:
Self-criticism can include negative self-talk reflecting how you feel about yourself, including believes such as:
- There’s nothing I truly like about myself.
- I’ll never succeed
- I’m not worthy of enjoying myself
- Other people are better, more deserving than me
- Nobody would ever be interested in me
- It’s all my fault – things that go wrong, go wrong because of me.
Over time, negative thoughts can become a habit, and with repeating them so often you can see these believes as facts.
Symptoms of low self-confidence
Symptoms of low self-confidence may include:
- Being withdrawn.
- Having anxiety
- Being unable to accept compliments.
- Worrying often about what other people think.
- Neglecting yourself.
- Being unwilling to take on challenges.
- Not trusting your own judgment.
- Needing approval.
- Fearing the future.
- Lacking motivation
- Lacking assertiveness
Self-help tips for building confidence
As well as using hypnotherapy, there are several other measures you can take to improve your confidence, such as:
- Taking care of your physical health by getting enough sleep, regularly eating balanced meals, and getting frequent exercise
- Surrounding yourself with positivity and kind people who are accepting and supportive and that don’t cause you to question your worth
- Hold on to the positives, acknowledge and take time to fully appreciate the good aspects of you and your achievements
- Regularly challenging yourself, taking calculated risks and challenging the negative beliefs you have about yourself and your abilities
- Allowing yourself to be in situations where you may fail
- Setting goals for yourself and making it a priority to achieve them
- Remaining true to your own values, even when it’s not popular or convenient, develop assertiveness, practice saying ‘no’ to people
- Following through on your commitments and avoiding procrastination
- Be more compassionate towards yourself
The perceptions you have of yourself are often based on false beliefs. These beliefs are learned, which means we can unlearn them. Your confidence changes, you can improve your self-confidence.