Does this sound like a strange combination: executive coaching and hypnotherapy? Actually, it’s a natural fit. I’m Dr. Wendy Hill, executive and business coach and hypnotherapist. I specialize in helping high level executives identify and transform underlying self-defeating core beliefs about self, money, love, success, and relationship. Your core beliefs literally dictate your emotions and behavior. Until you are aware of your hidden self-defeating core beliefs and transform them into core beliefs that serve you, you are at their mercy.
Here is an example of how this works and how hypnotherapy helps. Steve is a 53 year old client and CEO of a highly successful construction company. For years he has been able to run his business fairly efficiently in spite of his tendency to over think and over explain what he wanted to his employees. For the most part his employees gracefully put up with this time and energy consuming habit of their boss. Steve without realizing it was unconsciously undermining his employees ability to be creative and effective. Steve always sensed that there was something wrong but he couldn’t put his finger on it until one day one of his top managers and close friend, Mark, confronted Steve with his long-winded and draining lectures. Steve was taken aback. He thought that his communication style was an asset and even took pride in his ability to deliver his messages clearly. Once he got over the initial surprise he realized that his wife and other family members had expressed their frustration at having to listen to his long stress-inducing talks. Steve had the courage to tell me about his encounter with Mark and asked me to help him with his communication skills.
This is where hypnotherapy came in as an indispensable tool. I asked Steve to close his eyes and go back to a recent time when he was delivering one of his talks. Once he got the sense of what it felt like when he was doing that I asked him to think back to where he learned to do that. Instantly Steve remembered that his father would do the same thing. He remembered as a child being “held hostage”, as Steve put it, as his father would go on and on about how to do something. Learning to ride a bike was a daunting task when his father over-explained every detail of what he thought young Steve should know about bike riding. This robbed young Steve from his own sense of adventure and experimentation in learning to ride a bike. However young Steve didn’t realize at the time that he was learning to do exactly what his father did. After all, if father communicated in this manner then it must be the right way to communicate. So without thinking about what he was doing Steve adopted his father’s communication style and it became a pattern that continued to the present day.
Steve was amazed when he realized that he not only learned this way of communicating from his father but that it had frustrated him as a child just as it frustrated his own employees. By allowing me to use a simple hypnotherapy tool Steve was able to make the changes in his communication style. In ways that were subtle and some not so subtle his relationship with his employees improved and that improvement went straight to the bottom line of his business productivity.