‘Our brains are often more comfortable with the certainty of misery, than the uncertainty of happiness.’ –
Trevor Silvester
I left the charity sector in Aug 2020 after nearly 11 years working in Corporate Fundraising to pursue a career as a Cognitive Hypnotherapist. I walked away from a secure job into something that required me to retrain and build up a practice from scratch. But finally, at the age of 34, I knew I had found my calling.
I’d spent about half my career in charity no longer wanting to be a fundraiser, and I felt like I was slowly being worn down to the point of complete burnout. I’d lost all sense of meaning in what I was doing, and to be a successful fundraiser, as with most other careers, you have to have that drive and passion.
Every day I would go in to the office and tell myself that if I could just get that big new business win, then everything would be ok, and I could ride it out for a few more years. But it never came. And this played havoc with my belief that I wasn’t good enough. The endless cold calls, new business meetings and ultimately unsuccessful pitches had finally taken their toll, and yet for reasons unknown to me at the time I continued to stick at it.
After all I wasn’t good enough to do anything else, and surely it was too late to change career?
“I don’t have the time to retrain, I have a baby and a family to support.“
“And what if any new venture was a complete failure and I had to come crawling back to the charity sector with my tail between my legs? Surely it was best to just stick with what I knew and accept my unhappiness?”
At least these were the limiting beliefs, also known in the industry as ‘our bullshit’, that I’d held on to for so long, until I came across Cognitive Hypnotherapy.
I learned in my sessions with Charlotte Melki a close friend and qualified Quest Cognitive Hypnotherapist, and subsequently in my study to become a therapist myself, that the identities and beliefs we hold to be true about ourselves are built from experiences and pieces of information from our past and stored as memory.
Our brain then uses these experiences and pieces of information to create a ‘reality tunnel’, a personal illusion of reality that guides our actions, or in other words a story that we tell ourselves that we believe to be true.
In essence, we are a composite of all the experiences we have ever had, and the meanings that we take from them.
In my case, I had experienced many things in my life that had sent me the message of ‘I’m not good enough.’ So much so, that without even realising it, in my adult life and in my unconscious mind I had come to believe it! A prime example of this was at boarding school where teachers used to tell me on repeat that I would never be as good as my brother (to be fair he is excellent). But you can imagine how this made me feel. Hear this enough times and you begin to believe it, and boom, what do you know……….there’s my reality tunnel. I will never achieve anything significant, so why really bother?
How could I possibly think about trying something new, and building my own business, when it was guaranteed to be a failure?
The build up of our beliefs all happens very subtly throughout our lives, and so over time the more and more you experience things that solidify them (in my case multiple failed attempts at winning new business – just proving to me how I wasn’t good enough), they get added to your reality tunnel, and serve to cement the beliefs you hold about yourself.
But the good news is, the beliefs we hold about ourselves, are not true. Below is an extract from Hazel Gale’s excellent book, ‘Mind Monster Solution’ which explains why this is the case.
‘Negative self beliefs are not the truth. This is important. Beliefs are not the truth, they just feel like they are. Most of the things we think we know about ourselves are mere ideas – perspectives that we’ve picked up somewhere along the way, and then filtered through enough evidence for us to buy into them completely. The trouble with this is we often manifest what we fear about ourselves. This means that our limiting beliefs function like self fulfilling prophecies because we tend to make real what we least want, by keeping it at the forefront of our minds.’
Cognitive Hypnotherapy works by rewriting the way we perceive our past experiences. It is extremely effective at redirecting these thoughts and breaking down personal barriers. When I volunteered myself for sessions (when my friend was training) I had thought that I would need endless sessions and years worth of development to be able to make a meaningful change. However I very quickly learned that we all have the power within ourselves to change our reality, we just need some gentle redirection to get there.
Two months after just three sessions of therapy, I had quit my job and dedicated myself to a new path and I couldn’t be happier. Not just because I had finally found what I wanted to be doing, but because I can now help others do the same thing.
If you have been thinking you want to change careers or explore new avenues in life but there’s something holding you back that you can’t quite put your finger on. Please, give me a call or drop me an email and I’d be happy to work through it with you.
