Focus on Goals with Self Hypnosis: How to Increase Your Chances of Success

Self-hypnosis is a simple mental technique which narrows down your focus to just one thing. It's been used for many years to focus on goals, whether personal change or personal development goals or achievement goals in business, sport and the arts.

Here's a thought experiment (don't try it in real life). Imagine taking a large nail, say a six-inch nail, and a small, sharp tack. Now imagine that you're pushing first the nail, and then the tack, into the flesh of your arm (this is why I said not to actually try it). Which one is going to penetrate?

It's the tack, of course, and the reason is that the end is sharp. It has a single, narrow point on which all of the force you're exerting is focused. That's what self-hypnosis does.

How to Focusr
In order to get that sharp focus on your goals, you're going to need to let go of the usual awareness that you have, which is diffuse and spread over your whole surroundings. People sometimes ask me if they can listen to my hypnotherapy CDs while driving, and I always advise against it, because to drive safely you need a distributed awareness - what you're doing, what other vehicles are doing, what that kid on the side of the road is likely to do - whereas for self-hypnosis you need a focused awareness, a "selective attention".

That's why I mostly get people to close their eyes for hypnosis. Eye closure isn't essential, but because most people get most of their information visually, closing your eyes is an easy way to reduce the information flowing in so that you can concentrate on your interior imagery.

Relaxation isn't essential either, but again, it's widely used by hypnotherapists (including me). The reason is that when your body is relaxed, your sense of it is reduced, and when your mind is relaxed, your alertness to what is going on around you is reduced, freeing further resources to focus on your goals.

So, close your eyes, take a few deep breaths, and, working from head to toe, gently allow all the muscles of your body to relax. You can tighten them to get a better sense of them before you relax them if you like.

How to Deepen Your Focus Furtherr
Imaginative involvement is what you're looking for, so that you can focus on goals that you have for the future. So next, use a bit of imagination and walk yourself down a set of stairs. Count the stairs and take them slowly, and as you do so, imagine yourself going deeper and deeper below the surface of your everyday mind and into the "cellar", where your deep motivations, emotions and automatic thoughts are more accessible.

Once you're in the "cellar", you can play yourself an imaginary movie of yourself, focusing on your goal. Watch yourself for a while as you see your future self achieving your goals. Watch how you move, the expression on your face. Is it happy? Determined? Triumphant?

Now step into the screen and let it become a Star-Trek-style holodeck, where you experience in the first person what it's like to achieve your goals. Feel how it feels to move around as that successful future self, feel that expression on your face, create a vivid full-sensory experience, an imaginary memory. Link in as much powerful emotion as you can to deepen your focus. In challenging circumstances our minds grab for the memory with the most emotion attached to tell us how to address the situation. If that "memory" is the one you created of achieving your goals, guess what's going to happen?

When you're ready, allow your focus on your goals to gently recede into the deep levels of your mind, and allow your consciousness to return to its usual alert state, integrating all of the information from your senses about the exte
al world.

Notice how you can now focus on goals much more easily and achieve them almost inevitably.