After all, we have trained as hypnotherapists, and that doesn’t make us experts in the field of marketing, advertising, accounting and everything else we need to run a successful business

The first thing I personally would recommend that you do is get a small website, just a few pages will do to start with and it doesn’t have to be much.  This website is easier for people to remember than a phone number seen quickly on a poster or car.   If you want your website to be found in search engines such as Google then you need to talk to somebody about search engine optimisation.  This doesn’t have to cost the earth but the return on investment could be huge.

Another thing to do is get some posters printed, including the name of your website, and perhaps some car magnets so as you drive round town it is generating awareness.  The beauty of these advertising methods is that you pay once and then you don’t have to keep paying.  The car magnets, for example, could cost you £100 but you’ll only need one or two clients to pay for that and then any others will be a bonus.

Hypnotherapist Debbie Taylor-Payne, owner of Hypnotherapy Rooms in Huddersfield, made a special effort to help smokers.  The Huddersfield Daily Examiner published a list of top tips from Debbie on Thursday to help get smokers off to a strong start, including:

• using positive affirmations on a regular basis
• using visualisation to help see yourself as a non-smoker
• using water and low calorie drinks to satisfy your oral need
• breaking old habits, patterns and association by becoming aware of their existence and cues and replacing them with new ones
• using quick relaxation techniques to relieve tension and stress

You can read the full tips online here.

Debbie worked in the healthcare sector for more than 12 years before qualifying as a hypnotherapist and is registered with the National Council for Hypnotherapy.  She works out of three clinics with Hypnotherapy Rooms in Meltham, Marsden and Huddersfields and sees a lot of corporate, sports and business clients.  In the last year, she says she has seen a huge increase in the number of clients coming to her for smoking cessation.

The therapy is described on the site as ‘an integrative and eclectic psychotherapy’.  Sounds very posh!

We’ve talked about CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy) in the past in one or two different articles and it’s an excellent way for a hypnotherapist to expand their skills into a therapy that is accepted much more readily into the national health service.

Lou is also an advanced theta healer, not something I can profess to know much about but there’s plenty of information on his site.  From what I understand, it works in a similar way to hypnotherapy and NLP, working on belief patterns and reframing negative thought patterns for a more positive experience but incorporates muscle testing (kinesiology).

Lou is able to combine all these therapies into a single personalised session and offers a free 30 minute telephone consultation with the first session priced at £90 for up to two and a half hours.

Bill runs the Therapy Partnership and has worked in hypnotherapy for over 17 years. He is a member of the British Society of Clinical Hypnosis and also the British Association of Medical Hypnosis. Visit the Therapy Partnership website for more detail

Having worked as an occupational therapist, specialising in clients with mental health problems, Caroline decided to train in Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) and hypnotherapy so she could work as a life coach.

Caroline’s philosophy has always been to help people to help themselves and she finds that NLP is great for this as it gives people the tools to do that.  The hypnotherapy helps to retrain people’s unconscious mind to give them an extra boost.

She loves to see people’s faces when they know that they are capable of solving their problems.

NLP is not about counselling or talking people into a particular way of being.  It’s about realising that everyone has their own perspective on things, depending on their beliefs and their life history, so when five people go through the same event, they would each recount a different tale.

Caroline now runs her own life coaching company, Mango, and can be contacted on 07967 139 338.

Rates of caesarian sections have doubled in the past two years and intervention rates are around 28% compared to the ‘normal rate’ of 10 – 15% quoted by the World Health Organisation.

The Royal College of Midwives says the UK has a shortage of midwives and needs at least 3000 more, as well as 600 – 800 more obstetricians. One in ten first time mums do not have the opportunity of NHS antenatal classes and in many areas, the classes are no longer offered.

Pregnancy is fast turning in to a scary proposition for many women.

Two midwives, Anna Leeksma and Christine Sparling, both married mothers and still working in the NHS, and a hypnotherapist, Janay Alexander, have joined forces to create two courses designed to help fill this increasing gap: Birthsteps Antenatal Classes and Hypnobirthing Classes. Either course can be taken separately but they also work in tandem. The courses aim to increase the confidence of mums to be and help them to feel in control.

Hypnotherapist Janay Alexander (pictured) runs the Divine Interventions hypnotherapy practice based in Leamington Spa in Warwickshire and specializes in helping couples to conceive, hypno birthing and long term depression (although I’m sure the third isn’t connected!)

To celebrate, she is hold two free hypnosis workshops on Tuesday 29th January and Saturday 2nd February.

Kate is a qualified clinical hypnotherapist and NLP practitioner and holds a degree in psychology.  She says she finds it very rewarding to see people achieve their lifestyle dreams and goals.  Having been through several cycles of yo-yo dieting herself, Kate knows how important it is to focus on new ways of thinking to learn new habits and behaviour.

Kate will be using her skills to focus specifically on helping people with their bodies and food, particularly in giving up smoking, weight loss, self-assertiveness and achievement in sport or business.

Individual sessions are available from several locations, including The North Lakes Clinic in Cockermouth, where the workshops will be held and also from Nature’s Health Store in Penrith and Carlisle’s The Therapy Centre. Inner Health and Fitness will also open in Whitehaven as soon as Kate locates suitable premises.

For more detail on the workshops, please contact Kate through North Lakes Clinic or call 01900 828138.

Organisations
In the UK, there is no governing body for hypnotherapists. The industry is getting there slowly but in the meantime, there’s a lot of confusing organisations out there. There are two top groups competing for the government’s approval, so we would recommend that you start by checking that the hypnotherapist is on one of those two major registers. If they are on one of these, then they are registered with at least one of the organisations and these organisations have met certain criterion.

The Working Group for Hypnotherapy Regulation – the register opens in a pdf document. Once open, hold down CTRL, press F and then type in a surname, first name or town name to search through the document.

The UK Confederation of Hypnotherapy Organisations (UKCHO) – type either surname or registration number in the box onscreen to search.

Personally, I would stick with the Working Group’s register. I don’t say this out of any particular loyalty or because I’m against the UKCHO, but because when you search the UKCHO, at the time of writing all it confirms is registration number and name. I can’t help feeling that some names are quite common and there could be two people with the same name. I could search for a name and use it under false pretences, after all, you can’t tell from the register where that person should live or what their telephone number should be. I could even make up a fake certificate with the registration number on. Would you know what a UKCHO registration certificate looks like? I can tell you now that at the time of writing the hypnotherapists on the UKCHO register don’t even have one.

Training
Ring the hypnotherapist and ask about their training, how long they trained for, with which company, and how many classroom hours they have completed. The classroom part is important, because you don’t want someone who trained on a correspondence course. Usually, the organisation they have registered with requires a minimum number of classroom hours before registering the hypnotherapist anyway but it’s still worth checking. If it was a while ago, then it’s also worth asking if they complete Continuing Professional Development (CPD) too. This keeps their skills up to date

Length of Service / Price
Find out how long they’ve been in practice. Obviously, everyone has to start somewhere but they shouldn’t be asking top price if they’re still in their first year. Use a little common sense here as well. Is your case unusual? Phobias, stop smoking and weight loss are the basics of hypnotherapy so you might want to choose a cheaper and probably less experienced hypnotherapist for this type of thing. Ask them if they’ve dealt with similar cases before. Sometimes, if a hypnotherapist is less experienced and hasn’t dealt with something before, then they will offer to do an initial consultation (usually free) and will then research the case and consult with their peers before seeing you. You will need to decide between experience and price.

Letters After Their Name
All those letters after their name look pretty impressive, right? Some of the letters will represent the hypnosis qualifications, such as a diploma, a masters or a certificate in a particular specialist subject. Other letters will indicate to which organisations they belong.

Some letters are probably worth their salt, but sadly, many aren’t. We say that because anyone can start up a hypnotherapy training company and give out a diploma at the end of the course, so we recommend ignoring most of the letters and concentrate on their experience and training instead. Similarly, anyone can set up a hypnotherapy membership and allow members to put letters after their name. Stick with hypnotherapists on one of the registers.

If you follow these guidelines, you should find a good hypnotherapist. The majority of hypnotherapists work in hypnotherapy because they care and they want to help people. Most of them are properly qualified and keep up to date with their skills, but it’s the odd few that damage the reputation of the industry.

Unfortunately, the Lightning Process wasn’t available to Jenny locally, but she found a similar process called Mickel Therapy. Three years later, Jenny feels completely free of ME and has recently qualified as a clinical hypnotherapist herself, specialising in the Lightning Process, so that she can help others who find themselves in a similar situation that she has been through.

After years of having to put up with seven to eight hours bed rest a day, constantly feeling exhausted and sometimes being virtually housebound for up to six weeks at a time, Jenny can now finally be more active. She’s even dug out her old hiking boots and bike again.

Jenny’s is a member of the British Institute of Hypnotherapy and her hypnotherapy practice, Generating Change, is based in the city of York.

Tracey lost her mother, grandmother and great grandmother to ovarian cancer and lost her father to a rare cancer.  When she discovered she had inherited the BRCA1 gene which increases the risk of cancer, Tracey chose to have a genetic test.  The test confirmed she had an 85% chance of developing cancer.  After much deliberation, the Yorkshire lady chose to have a hysterectomy and double mastectomy to reduce the risk.  She didn’t want her children to go through the same experience she had with her parents.  It was a tough time, but she found hypnotherapy was a great help with her anxiety and fear.  As far as Tracey’s concerned, cancer research saved her life and hypnosis got her through her ordeal.

Six years later, Tracey qualified as a hypnotherapist herself with the Leeds-based Northern College of Therapeutic Hypnosis (NCTH) and she works to help others with their own traumas.  In December, she was appointed to help the NCTH as an Assistant Lecturer in hypnotherapy and is currently shadowing Senior Lecturers.  Tracey really enjoys giving talks and seminars on hypnotherapy

Now, Tracey does everything she can to raise money for Cancer Research UK and in three months time, she will be running in the London Marathon for the first time.  She has run several half marathons before, but this time she’s going for the big event and is featured in the Bradford Telegraph today appealing for sponsorship.

Anybody who would like to support Tracey in raising money for Cancer Research UK can do so online