A preliminary check-in for hypnosis only takes 10 - 15 minutes. If it takes a little longer than that, that's okay. It's more important that you be client-centered. That's what will get you the results.
Everything you do in a session has a purpose. The purpose of your preliminary check-in is to answer two important questions. That's it, so don't turn it into chit-chat with the client.
The first question is: "What do you remember about last session?"
The second question is: "What happened between sessions?"
The Why
The first question gives you a way to pick up where you left off in the previous session. Just ask the client to mentally do a little rewind back to the previous session and tell you what they remember. This will help to refresh your memory. But more importantly, it can be very revealing.
Hypnotherapy is a journey of self-discovery and self-healing.
Often what you’ll find is that the client will share more about their first session than they did the first time. They may have had some realizations after they left the session. Giving the client a few moments to share in retrospect can result in more insights being brought to light.
Insight is a precursor to understanding. Understanding is the Conscious Mind making sense of things. This includes why the client is taking this journey with you.
Hypnotherapy naturally stirs things up at a Subconscious level of Mind. Following a session the Subconscious Mind is going to go to work, sorting through things and finding ways to integrate change. As a result, things can bubble up to the surface of consciousness. This is the purpose for the second question.
The client may remember things that they haven’t thought about in years. They may have interesting dreams. Emotions can start bubbling to the surface – sometimes unexpectedly. That’s the Subconscious Mind speaking. And it knows why the client is seeing you.
These things are all relevant to the client’s issue.
Maybe they felt great following the session, but it only lasted for a couple of days. Maybe they lost the better feeling. Maybe something happened to trigger them.
If the client felt better following a session but they weren’t able to hold onto the change, or they got triggered, now you know what the next step in the healing process needs to be. That’s an emotional issue. So, you know that suggestion alone isn’t going to get the job done.
There’s an underlying emotional issue that keeps reinstalling itself and that’s what’s calling for resolution. The next step would be to find out where that feeling is coming from.
Maybe they slept really well for the first time in ages. If so, this is good news because many people are sleep-deprived. Just improving a person’s sleep can make a big difference in how they think, and feel, and behave in daily life.
A person who isn’t getting enough sleep can’t think clearly.
That’s why sleep deprivation is the leading cause of motor-vehicle and job-related accidents. It impairs a person’s cognitive abilities and this can impact your results.
Regression hypnosis is a process of revisiting and re-evaluating past events. Sleep deprivation can block your client’s ability to think clearly enough to evaluate what was revealed to them, during a session. This can block change from occurring because it takes consciousness to change consciousness.
The client needs to see how experiences in the past have been creating their future. Then they can decide to allow change. You can’t just tell them. They have to decide. To do that, they need to be able to think clearly.
When we sleep, the Conscious Mind goes into abeyance and the Subconscious Mind goes to work on emotional healing and memory reconsolidation. There’s learning taking place. Helping your clients to sleep better can help to clear the mental fog giving you a better client to work with.
This is a process that will support the client in healing.
So that’s it.
The client’s first session is naturally going to stir things up. As a result, something is going to happen between sessions. The question is – WHAT?
Hindsight is 20-20. So, use your pre-hypnosis check-in to ask the client, "What happened during the last session? Then, "What happened between sessions?"
These two questions will tell you how best to proceed in this session. You’ll know what the next step needs to be in the client’s healing process.
That’s all you ever need to know. What’s the next step?
Get Ready for Regression!
In the Create Your Ideal Client Session course module, you will learn a step-by-step process you can use to set up for subsequent sessions by conditioning your client to go back into hypnosis very quickly and easily.
