Speaking to Your Emotions to Achieve Your Goals - Nikki Rogers
Most successful entrepreneurs know that intelligence and talent are just the starting points for success. We can always improve and our basic abilities can be developed with intention and dedication. Therefore, creating a mindset that supports productive daily habits is one of the best ways to grow personally and professionally.
On Episode 9 of Women Thriving in Business Podcast I discuss the power of your mind and your emotions with neuroscientist and hypnotist Randall Hayes. One of the topics we harnessed on was the power of your emotions and using your emotions to set you up to achieve your goals.
For example, in entrepreneurship, there are many things that we want to do or achieve. We have grand goals and dreams, but often times we catastrophize them. We imagine the worst things that can happen and it can deter us from reaching our goals. But, changing your mindset around this may lead to a different result.
I asked Randall if hypnosis can help someone to think more positively about the possible outcomes of our personal efforts:
“Our goals are usually cognitive. Bearing words, they might be images. Cognition is fairly shallow. It’s up on the surface of the brain. Your emotions are at a deeper level and the real housekeeping functions of running your body are at a deeper level still, and emotion is what really drives behavior. A lot of our thinking is really just rationalizing decisions that we’ve already made emotionally. Once in a while, you can steer emotion but really emotion is in charge.
“What you need to do is to find a way to speak to your emotions, which are mostly unconscious unless you have developed a lot of awareness, a lot of mindfulness around your emotions, then a lot of the time your decisions are already made before you really know about them. Hypnosis is a procedure for using these trance states to bypass the cognitive judgmental level of awareness and to speak more directly to those emotions.
“For instance, somebody who wants to stop smoking. That is one of the procedures that you would use to do that is actually to write a script that while you’re in that trance state and you’re imagining a cigarette would be to change the flavor of that cigarette to something nasty or to imagine smashing together, like taking that cigarette dipping it in something disgusting. Because in this particular case, it’s a negative emotion, it’s a negative response. But that’s what you’re trying to do. You’re trying to stop doing something, and so that’s a pretty classic method of trying to get past the fairly shallow cognitive kinds of things like, ‘Well, this is really expensive. This is not healthy for me.’ Let’s really talk about something that’s going to change your behavior. Let’s talk about ‘this is just gross.’
“The same kind of thing can work for the positives. It depends on the particular goal that you’re trying to meet and the particular issues that you’re having around that goal.” - Randall Hayes
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About Nikki: Nikki Rogers is a transformation coach assisting people and organizations to grow and become sustainable entities. She is an experienced management consultant that works to bridge gaps and create opportunities for all. Nikki supports strategic visions to co-create success with other leaders.
