If you want to grow a practice that pays, you need to be able to distinguish yourself from the herd. That’s very difficult if all you have to offer are relaxation and symptom-management techniques.
They don't tell you this in hypnosis school but most people are not looking for hypnosis. Most people don't know anything about hypnosis. And often what they do know has been contaminated by Hollywood, bad press and mis-information. But you probably already know this . . .
The problem is that these things are working against you and your best efforts to promote yourself and your services.
People don't pay for hypnosis. They pay for results.
If you want to grow your healing practice and make it pay, you need to invest in growing yourself by developing your knowledge and skill at working with deeper issues.
If you can show folks how what you do is different from every other option they're considering, you won't have to work so hard to get paid. You'll be able to grow a referral-based business that is based in your ability to get results consistently.
To do this, you need to be able to adapt to the needs of each client. This is because no two clients are ever alike. They may come to you with similar problems but it's never the same issue.
The key to successful hypnotherapy is to choose the approach is that is best for the client because some clients are going to come to you with simple issues. And some are going to need help with deeper issues.
Simple issues respond to simple techniques.
That's what you learned in basic training. You learned one, or two, or three-session protocols that work well for simple issues. But if you try to use a simple technique on an emotional problem it won't work. The results won't last.
The client might experience some relief for a while. But, eventually, the symptoms will either return or they'll get worse. This can frustrate the daylights out of you if you don't recognize that you're probably dealing with a deeper issue.
Deeper issues are emotional issues.
Emotions don't come out of nowhere. They have their roots in the individual's personal history. And these issues can involve complexity, especially when the problem has been around for a while, because the problem has had time to grow and built up internal pressure.
This is when people are most likely to turn to alternative healing methods. It's when nothing else has worked. But by then there can be multiple layers contributing to the problem. There can be multiple aspects. There can be multiple events feeding into the problem.
These things can take time to clear.
When you're dealing with a deeper issue, there's always a block getting in the way and preventing change from happening. It will show up in your sessions as "resistance."
There can be conscious resistance where the client doesn't want to "go there." There can be subconscious resistance where the underlying truth is being hidden from conscious awareness. These things effectively prevent healing from happening.
Healing is not something you can do.
Healing is something that happens naturally - given the right conditions. Your job is to simply create those conditions where healing can happen naturally. That's when the client feels safe enough to allow healing to happen.
This is where the business is waiting for you.
The business is not in the surface issues. It’s in the deeper issues that don’t respond well to surface techniques. Too many hypnosis practitioners are struggling simply because the market for simple issues is highly saturated, these days.
Face it. You're probably not the only hypnosis practitioner in your town. Like it or not, you've got competition. Not only can this seriously limit your client-base, you'll have to invest a lot more time and effort into promoting yourself, and your services, just to get enough clients to make a living. That can get costly.
From a purely economic point of view, it's very difficult to make a living doing one-off sessions. You end up working too hard, and most of your energy gets directed toward finding the next client just so you can pay the next bill. That's no way to make a living.
Why compete when you can transcend?
Seriously, 97% of the business is not in the surface stuff, anyway. It's in the deeper issues, where nothing else has worked!