Proteges of the Raj Manek Mentorship Program were offered a tremendous opportunity for growth at the organization’s October seminar.
At the “mic” was Heather Rodriguez, hypnotherapist and teacher of the Regina business,“Hypno Heather.”
Trained in Marlborough, Massachusetts, Heather started her business in 2014, realizing that she could better teach and treat patients if she was an entrepreneur herself.
She recognized that busy people like entrepreneurs could only scale their businesses if they scaled personally. So much about business building requires confidence and motivation; and clients most often ask her to help them improve on those two attributes. Heather shared that this often means that our priorities and relationships need to change: “Things are not just treated by action, but also from within.” We tend to bracket off our emotional lives and then wonder why we cannot perform well.
She described our subconscious minds as the 90% of the iceberg that is immersed in water, out of sight and below awareness; while the conscious mind and activities that we get stuck in amount to only 10% of our minds. When we can “let our guards down,” and plumb the subconscious for unaddressed pain, loss and other repressed emotion, we can liberate our conscious minds from feeling “stuck,” unmotivated, lazy, weak and pain-filled.
All that we have, as humans, she says, are our thoughts, our minds and our consciousness: “All that we really have control of in the world is our thinking.”
Old ways of doing things (including “comfortable old habits”) can be ineffective and these and the fear that often underpins them contribute to self-sabotaging behaviours that undermine our growth. These include binge-eating or binge-Netflix watching, craving and eating too much chocolate, alcoholism, narcotic use, over-sleeping and more. We engage in these behaviours because we’re unhappy and because we don’t acknowledge our submerged fears.
Our minds don’t recognize the difference between a successful and an unsuccessful blueprint of thinking—our minds simply follow our thoughts, however hazardous, distorted or wrong they may be.
The goal of hypnotherapy is to create a more successful blueprint, so that we can live in alignment with our own minds.
Heather identified that when we feel fear, we should ask ourselves, “What excites me? What do I want to do next?” in our businesses, rather than giving way to fear. Fear arises when we push our own limits and start to grow within our minds.
At the same time, unhappy emotions disrupt our growth: Heather says we should not judge ourselves for having unhappy feelings, as the negativity of judgment will only erode our confidence. Instead, she advised us to ask ourselves: “What thought is making me feel this way and is the thought even true?” Often it is not. And yet we tend to believe everything we think.
And action we take when we react to distorted thinking can sabotage our lives. We should avoid “reactive” responses to our thoughts.
Although we often repress opportunities to change out of fear, desire fuels our motivation. We need to have relationships that support us, as we deal with our fear.
When we do create that more successful blueprint for our thinking, we can reach peak states of mind, through which we can institute change and take a “vertical” leap “up and out” of our thought-obsessed, horizontal patterns. Here is “where the money is, both literally and figuratively,” Heather advised. That leap is all about growth and change.
Internally oriented action won’t fail, unlike that which comes externally from others. In this hyper-digital age with the internet at our fingertips, those of us who are more creatively fulfilled increase our chances of success.
What most of us need is time to relax, mentally, that allows us to better align with our subconscious minds. Sometimes journalling, taking long walks, getting exercise, cooking from scratch and similar activities can hold us “in-the-moment,” and so help to calm our minds and “get in flow.” Hypnosis functions like meditation to bypass critical factors into our subconscious, circumventing the judgments and beliefs that limit us so much.
When we are in alignment with our emotions, not surprisingly, our work also goes better. Pushing ourselves when we are in a low mood is not productive or caring. We can decide “not to spend more time in our [conscious] minds, right now.” The “break” provided by hypnotherapy and other, enlightened activities, reduces stress hormones like Cortisol and enables us to transform our minds, as recent theories of neuroplasticity suggest.
Heather identified among all these insights an unfulfilled need amongst clients in Saskatchewan. She therefore now offers three month treatment packages, in-person, as well as online. She works as well with hypnotherapists in other cities and countries.
And now it’s your turn: If you’re based in Regina or can work long distance via Skype or Zoom, would you consider engaging in hypnotherapy with a licensed specialist like Heather? Hypnotherapy by a qualified, licensed practitioner can provide a tool to increase your capacity for growth, happiness and success.