Can hypnotherapy and NLP support personal development?

Someone asked me the other day whether NLP and hypnotherapy can help with personal development. My answer was yes. The first question I’d ask anyone who wants to get started is this: What would you like to be doing differently six months from now?

Perhaps you’d like to speak up at work without spending the rest of the day replaying what you said. Maybe you want to permit yourself to do something you’ve been putting off for years.

Personal development is the lifelong, deliberate process of getting to know yourself, building skills and confidence, and taking care of your wellbeing. It’s also about looking at how you spend an ordinary Tuesday, for example, and asking whether it reflects what matters to you and where you want to go.

How NLP and hypnotherapy can work together

Neuro-linguistic programming, or NLP, took shape in the 1970s through the work of Richard Bandler, John Grinder and others. Hypnosis has a much longer history. In the 1840s, surgeon James Esdaile experimented with mesmerism, an early practice related to hypnosis, to control pain during surgery.

In coaching, for example, NLP-informed questions can be used to explore how people describe their experiences and what happens when they look at those experiences from another angle. If someone says, “I always get it wrong,” a coach might ask, “Can you think of a time you handled something better than you expected?” One real example gives us something to work with.

A hypnotherapist might use guided relaxation and focused attention to invite someone to mentally rehearse an everyday situation. That could mean imagining themselves asking a question in a meeting, hearing their own voice and giving themselves time to finish what they want to say.

Together, these approaches can offer different ways to explore personal goals, build self-awareness and consider how you might approach situations differently.

Defining what success means to you

A woman got in touch with me because she wanted support with her personal development. She had goals and dreams for her life and wanted to do something about them. Over the course of our work together, she went on to achieve what she had set out to do.

What I value about her story is that she decided what success meant for her. That’s where I start in my work. When someone tells me they want more confidence, I’m curious about what they would actually do with that confidence. The answer gives us a goal in their own words.

From there, NLP and hypnotherapy can be used to explore what's holding someone back and help them work towards their goals.

What are you giving your attention to?

I rarely sit down to watch the news these days, yet the worrying stories still find their way into conversations. It makes me wonder how often we give the good news the same airtime, especially when it’s about ourselves.

When you expect to get something wrong, it’s easy to dwell on the one awkward moment and skim over everything you handled well. So I often ask clients to notice a specific piece of evidence they might otherwise overlook.

Did you make the call you’d been avoiding? Did you ask for help before things became overwhelming? Did you try again after a difficult day? Those moments can tell you something about the skills and courage you already have.

That’s what I mean when I say, focus on what you want. You can take a difficulty seriously and still give some attention to the outcome you’d like. I often say, “No failure, only feedback.”

As someone who struggled with stress and panic as a teenager, I know how easily a setback can start to feel like a verdict on who you are. A more useful question to ask is: What did I learn, and what could I attempt next?

There's no perfect time to start

Whether you're a teenager beginning to decide what success means to you or someone in your 80s who still has things you want to learn, change or try, personal development can happen at any age.

You may be stronger than you realise, braver than you give yourself credit for and smarter than a difficult experience has led you to believe.

If stress, worry or self-doubt has been taking up too much of your attention, try asking yourself: What would I like more of in my life, and what’s one thing I could do this week to move towards it?