It’s all back to school this month. Kids are back, colleges are back and universities are getting ready to welcome their students back too. After a very disrupted 18 months in our educational systems returning to education for both students and teachers can feel a relief or can be daunting after so long at home.
Those of us that work in teaching and training are preparing for a busy autumn and hoping we can continue to train face to face with no further lockdowns disrupting our educational system.
As a teacher of adults, I have come across a variety of obstacles and barriers to learning many are caused by the self-limiting beliefs of the student. I hear time and time again women telling me they struggle with theory and that they are not “academic” I find this such a shame. Not being good at Maths or Geography doesn’t mean you are not academic. It could simply be that subject doesn’t interest you and the teacher was the one failing to make their subject interesting and has not tried to find the right learning style for you.
The trouble is we can carry labels around for our whole lives, and my own early years’ experience of school life wasn’t great. I was labelled early on as being non-academic and also told I was shy. Neither of which are true by the way.
It took me a long time though to see and value my own talents and worth. Right from birth we start learning from our parents. That is where we get our view of the world, our belief system and what we perceive as the truth and store this all in our mind.
Up to the age of around 8 or 9 years are old we are almost purely subconscious in the way we are processing things (emotional and in the moment). We saw it, we did it, and we learnt. We sponged up all the information being inputted via our senses with very little critical input or experiential filters. We created what we might refer to as our map of reality. Around this age we then started to develop our more logical, rational, or conscious way of thinking. What came with our conscious mind is a thing that legendary pioneer of hypnotherapy, Dave Elman called the Critical Faculty.
The Critical Faculty is the part of your thinking that when new information comes in via our senses it judges it for truth. If it doesn’t match up with (or isn’t at least compatible with) what’s on our map of reality the Critical Faculty will reject it as false, no matter how logical and reasonable it seems to our conscious mind.
The Critical Faculty is like having a security guard of your mind.
The critical faculty guards your belief systems in your subconscious. It will let things in, but only things that don’t have anything contradicting them in your existing beliefs. It will deflect and filter out anything that goes against the things you already know.
Example: If you developed a fear of spiders when you were young then no amount of realising they can’t hurt you stops the fear response from triggering when you see a spider in your adult years. Your subconscious knows spiders are scary and isn’t listening to your logical, rational conscious mind as it tries to change that belief. The Critical Faculty’s only job is to maintain a consistent view of reality, no matter how unhelpful that reality has now become.
As parents we are our children’s own hypnotists, what we programme into their brains from an early age e.g. ‘spiders are scary’ stays with them. So, it is vital as parents, grandparents, teachers or carers we instil a sense of self-worth into our children. If they pick up that we are anxious about the new school term they will be anxious about it too, this is learnt behaviour.
As we become adults, we start to regard certain beliefs as inappropriate. We come to realise that spiders are not so scary, that we don’t need to feel anxious about travel or starting something new just because our parents do.
It is then that we need to change what our subconscious mind (mistakenly) regards as true.
The Control system has a unique way of getting directly to the part of the mind we need help make the change.
Rather than trying to get past the security guard of our mind and force our way into the building (mind) using the CONTROL system and the principles underpinning hypnosis we take everything of interest to us in that building and bring it outside so we can deal with it without the interference or the protection of the security guard.
To achieve this, we need to induce a state of subconscious dominance. This exposes the subconscious mind to new ideas and allows it to entertain and adopt more appropriate beliefs and patterns of thought.
Why do we need to contact our subconscious? Whilst it is certainly the true that your subconscious is the more emotional and child-like part of our thinking it is also the most powerful. Our subconscious controls our imagination and emotions.
As soon as our subconscious mind commits to an idea then you will have a desperately difficult time trying to override it.
For example
*We know spiders cannot hurt us yet we are still afraid
*We know cigarettes will kill is yet we still smoke
*We know worrying achieves nothing yet we still worry.
The Control system is not hypnosis, I do not use any form of trance hypnotherapy and I can teach you to get in touch with your own subconscious and overcome the obstacles and barriers caused by past experience and past learnt behaviour so you can be free from those self-limiting beliefs and can excel in life.
I work with my clients on a one-to-one basis or through 1 day group workshops teaching you how to use the control system yourself.
If this new term is not filling you with joy and you need help getting back on track get in touch. Maybe its time to learn a new way of doing this and how to get Control of your thoughts and feelings
Next 1 day workshop runs on 24th October 9.30am-4.30pm
