Mental performance training may go under a variety of assumed names: “guided meditation”, “guided imagery”, or “relaxation”, but it all comes down to an altered state of focused attention and heightened suggestibility – that is to say, hypnosis and self-hypnosis. 

In this altered state of mind you can refine your goals, enhance your creativity, strengthen your communication skills and organization, develop mental toughness, learn to control your emotional state, and dissolve the negative thinking and blocks that had been interfering with giving your all and realizing your full potential.

Here are some of the ways that hypnosis can help you as an executive or leader:

“The Zone”:  We all know it when we see it and if you have ever been there, you never forget the feeling: 

You are in the flow, focused yet relaxed. You feel grounded, yet free, open to new solutions, new mental pathways. You are at rest, but ready to act.

With hypnosis – self-hypnosis, really – you can get into “The Zone” deliberately, not just on random occasions, and perform consistently at a high level.

Visualization: See or imagine yourself exactly the way you want to be, in every respect. Now step into being that person, speaking with their voice and feeling the power in that voice, moving with their body, thinking clearly with their mind, and feeling with their heart, their spirit. Go through what used to be a difficult or uncomfortable situation as them, handling it easily and comfortably, with mastery and grace. And then integrate that vision with the current you.

Mental Toughness: State Control, and Peak Performance: Performance anxiety is an individual thing, but in all cases it is learned behavior. Somewhere along the line, you may have inadvertently picked up a negative emotional response to a certain situation or “triggers”.  Through hypnosis and NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) you can learn to change your mental state at will, to have different responses to those same situations and triggers.

And while we generally want to promote relaxed states of ease, sometimes you want a certain keyed-up, excited, edgy feeling.  So that what used to be anxiety becomes transformed into the positive stress (eustress) of being psyched, taking you beyond what you thought were your limits and nailing it.

Modeling: Carry visualization one step further by modeling a leader you admire and transferring their skills to yourself.  In your mind, watch <fill in the name> as they ... Next, step into and be that person – be in that body, seeing with their eyes, moving with their muscles, thinking with their mind.  Do it slow, do it fast, memorize every aspect of their performance, from the inside.  Check to make sure you have it exactly right. The final step is to become yourself, in your own body – doing those same things, in the same ways, as when you were that person.  Do it over and over and over again.