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Hypnotherapy?! On Yer Bike!

Now I’m not one for getting on my bike – I am still haunted by a visit to Centre Parks when the kids were little and we thought it would be great to hire bikes. Guess who got the ‘tuk tuk’ shaped bike with the raging three year old in the back complete with picnic?  […]

Julie Phillips Therapeutic Coaching, blog posts, calming

Now I’m not one for getting on my bike – I am still haunted by a visit to Centre Parks when the kids were little and we thought it would be great to hire bikes. Guess who got the ‘tuk tuk’ shaped bike with the raging three year old in the back complete with picnic?  Eventually I fell off the damn thing much to the amusement of on lookers and a rather stark plea from my then 6 year old daughter “mum, please don’t ride that bicycle again.”

End of my career

So that was it, the end of my cycling career, although I do like the occasional tootle through the woods in summer – it is fair to say I won’t be going for the Milk Race anytime soon; I just didn’t have the ability to know what to change to make me a better cyclist.  This got me to thinking about how easy is it to make changes to our lives that are long lasting? Recently I read an article on the approach made by the Performance Director for Team Sky (Britain’s Cycling Team) a man called David Brailsford

1% change is the key to lasting change.

In 2010 Brailsford was given a challenge to improve the team’s chances of bringing home the gold.  Interestingly, Brailsford believed in a concept that he referred to as the “aggregation of marginal gains.” He explained it as “the 1 percent margin for improvement in everything you do.” His belief was that if you improved every area related to cycling by just 1 percent, then those small gains would add up to remarkable improvement.

The team started by optimizing the things you might expect: the nutrition of riders, their weekly training program, the ergonomics of the bike seat, the clothing of the rider and the weight of the tires.

You would think that would have been enough, but Brailsford and his team didn’t stop there. They searched for 1 percent improvements in tiny areas that were overlooked by almost everyone else: discovering the pillow that offered the best sleep and taking it with them to hotels, testing for the most effective type of massage gel, and teaching riders the best way to wash their hands to avoid infection. They searched for 1 percent improvements everywhere.

Brailsford believed that if they could successfully execute this strategy, then Team Sky would be in a position to win the Tour de France in five years’ time….he was wrong. They won it in three years.

Sweat the small stuff!

When I am working with clients who want to make a change, it can be the smallest things that are overlooked; almost every habit that you have — good or bad — is the result of many small decisions over time; how easily we forget this when we want to make a long-lasting change.

Some clients get themselves stuck in a cycle of ‘no change’ because their goals are so big that it seems impossible to know where to start and they put pressure on themselves to make huge life changes quickly which seldom works out in the long run.

Just ten minutes

Whilst improving by just 1 per cent isn’t always noticeable at first, it can be very meaningful in the longer term. Take weight gain: a small increase in biscuit consumption may not be noticeable at first but over the long term the pounds creep on. Similarly, adding just ten minutes to your daily dog walk may seem small but if you are going out three times a day that’s an extra half hour a day’s worth of exercise.

Hypnotherapy for Change

Finding yourself ‘stuck’ in unwanted patterns of behaviour is not because of something you did in an instant, it happened due to small changes over time. Hypnotherapy is a natural way of working with your unconscious mind to help ‘tap into’ that motivation for change. Hypnotherapy is a gentle way to help start the wheels turning and support new behaviours for the changes you desire.

Here are Five Key reasons to use hypnotherapy for long term change:

  1. Hypnotherapy is a natural way to work with your unconscious mind
  2. Hypnotherapy can help ‘un-lock’ the powerhouse of new resources
  3. Hypnotherapy can help your brain change unwanted patterns of behaviour and provide a better program to run instead.
  4. Hypnotherapy supports mind and body connection to focus in on the smallest of things that you may have overlooked before.
  5. Hypnotherapy works to help strengthen emotional resilience which means choosing change for the better is an easy long term option.

If you would like to work with me, then please do get in touch.