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Life Coach & Personal Trainer
Self Hypnosis
Healing the self through reprogramming the mind
Relaxation + Visualisation = Manifestation
What is self-hypnosis? Self-hypnosis gives you practical tools to first quiet the mind and relax the body, it allows you to create healing energy and behavioural changes through reprogramming how the mind thinks and body feels.
As humans we learn behaviour for self-protection and survival and can hang onto learnt childhood responses which are not necessary for our survival to date. It is good to review these behaviours as we grow and change.
Self-hypnosis at first will teach you how to quiet the mind and learn relaxation. Stage one is to find a chair with a straight back and where your feet can comfortably reach the floor. 2 – turn everything off and sit quietly with eyes closed 3 – relax each part of your body by feeling or visualising each muscle including the face. Start with the feet work up to the body to the head. Subconsciously tell each muscle to relax and feel it physically relax.
Next count back from 100 down to 1, as you do this see yourself in your mind’s eye either walking down stairs or going down in a lift. You can visualize any type of descending activity that you feel comfortable with. Once you reach the bottom see yourself entering your favourite place through a door and stay there for a bit familiarising yourself with the environment. This can be a beach, woods, house, it’s your fantasy so enjoy it. Try and visualize colours, sounds, noise, objects, feelings. Feel yourself relaxing and just being in that space.
When you’re ready to leave count up from 1 – 10, now ascending your stairs or lift, and with each step tell yourself you are waking feeling confident, happy, strong and ready to fulfill your destiny in love and light. Practice daily and you’ll get better at it. You may not see changes straight away but stick with it.
Most people are afraid to just sit with self and hear their thoughts. Know you are in total control over your body and mind and therefore self. This exercise will help you have more control over your thinking and then, in turn, your actions and behaviours.
I will soon be introducing visualisation techniques that will help break behaviours and blockages to achieving your goals but this is the first stages of achieving healing through visualisation.
@michellept.co.uk #fightingfitstudio
The First Stages to Loving Self
Part 1 = the “I”
Loving self is the first stage to mental health and self confidence. Loving self is about accepting yourself as you are, that’s both positive and negative traits of self. We must also understand and tame what the buddhist call, the monkey mind. This is the eternal chatter that goes on within ourselves.
Let’s start with self, we have an individual self the ’I’ and a social self the ’me’. To feel comfortable in our skin we have to marry the two. So I will begin with the ‘I’, this is the private self that only you know. These are your “I” statements, as in “I am beautiful” or opposing statement “I am ugly”. “I am gay” or “I get angry / jealous”. These are all” “I statements that you can choose to share with others or not.
When you talk about self in terms of “I” how do you describe yourself to you and then to others. If these aren’t positive statements and beliefs about self then you need to change the conversation. Instead of concentrating on what you believe to be negatives about yourself start describing and talking about yourself only in positive terms. What do you love about yourself, what do you do well.
Then your next step is accepting the traits in yourself that you perceive as negative and put them into a more positive light.
So what do I mean by this, an example is “I’m fat / ugly”, change this to “I’m a beautiful person but I need to lose some weight” or “what do I need to do to feel better about myself”.
A bit like writing a reference, it is not acceptable or professional to only give negative comments no matter how bad that employee was. You have to find positives before laying into the negatives. Even when you are giving negatives you still need to put them in a professional manner.
So for instance you can not just say “she / he was always late” or “he / she is lazy”.
You would have to come at it from a different angle e.g “she / he is a good team player but has a problem with time keeping” or “he / she is a good communicator but lacks motivation”.
Did you see what I did there 🙂
This is no different when we talk about the self in “I” statements. So whenever critiquing the self think how you may do it in a reference. This ensures you have a certain amount of positivity when it comes to the self and changing behaviours and thoughts that restrict you.
Pad Workouts
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Using fighting skills gained from years of martial arts experience in wing chun & jeet kune do – exercises and padwork to improve fitness, endurance and strength.
Burn calories, lose weight, strengthen core & Improve technique, speed & flexibility.
Self-Empowerment
By Michelle Crawford
“In order to achieve, you must believe..”
As a counsellor and trainer I often speak to my clients about the ‘Self-fulfilling prophecy’, so what do I mean by that?
Well if you believe yourself to be weak you will be weak, if you tell yourself you can’t do something then you won’t. What you believe about yourself, your future, your abilities, etc is the reality you create for yourself.
Self-empowerment means taking responsibility for your life and changing your life and this begins by how we talk to ourselves.
Being empowered means we own our weaknesses and our strengths and not looking at our experiences as black and white. For instance not achieving something when you first try is not a failure. It is, however, guidance to what you need to do next time in order to achieve your goal. We should learn from our mistakes and not berate ourselves or be berated for trying. Every experience in our lives is there to teach us something, it is up to us to listen and learn from it.
As a personal trainer and therapist, I don’t like the title ‘life coach’, I promote self-awareness regardless of how hard my clients might find this at first because I know in the long run my clients become mentally stronger as well as physically stronger and this will create long term behavioural changes.
Training mental and physical strength;
Some people in society have very low self-esteem caused by experiences growing up, and this low self-esteem creates a negative dialogue in our minds. This negative dialogue can cause us to stop believing in ourselves and our self-worth. So if we constantly use the phrase “I can’t”, then you won’t and you’re limiting yourself and denying yourself.
If you tell yourself “I don’t know if I can do that” and you try then if you weren’t successful you are more open to the reasons why and changing them in order to get there.
My experience with female clients tells me they do this all the time. I will give them a 6kg weight to lift and they will tell me it’s too heavy. Yet they pick their child up all the time which probably weighs a lot more. When their child comes to them and needs comforting they don’t instantly look at the child and say I can’t pick you up you’re too heavy, they will find a way.
Women’s self-fulling prophecy is that they believe themselves to be weaker than men. They don’t say to themselves I might be weaker than him but by no means am I weaker than you. They then push this philosophy on all women. So now all women are weaker than all men. No this is not the case. They then continue this prophecy even further and believe they can’t build muscle or shouldn’t build muscle because it’s unattractive. Well with muscle comes to strength and when you discover how much you can lift far outweighs what you thought this becomes empowering.
For people who struggle to lose weight, this self-fulfilling prophecy stops you from either losing the weight or maintaining the weight loss. In order to maintain weight loss, you have to look at what allowed you to gain weight in the first place.
What was it in your life experience that makes you dislike yourself so much that you present to the world an image you don’t like yourself.
If you loved yourself you would want the world to see the best of you.
This negativity to self can come out in the language we use to talk about ‘self’.
Some people do this by constantly using themselves as a source for humour i.e Dawn French and Jo Brand. If they loved themselves and their weight so much then why have they both lost weight or have even bothered with diets?
Others use negative language when describing themselves such as “I hate my arms they’re all flabby” or “er I don’t like looking at myself in the mirror”. By refusing to see themselves in the mirror there is obviously a dislike there.
Some people will only get undressed in the dark, while others won’t be seen in a bathing suit and talk about their bodies in very negative ways. They then victimise themselves by using language that intimates they don’t have control over themselves or their lifestyle.
If we tell ourselves we are unattractive or we are not able to stop eating even though we dislike how we look then there are self-sabotaging behaviours going on stopping us from achieving our goals. At this point you probably need some professional help or a support group to help you achieve your weight loss, but what about your mental health.
Some people go on to run marathons to get better self-worth, others may do this in a different way. But however, you do it in order to maintain weight loss you have to develop better self-worth and love for yourself.
Weight loss is not all about the food and calories it’s about developing a better lifestyle and better understanding of the ‘self’, abandoning negative talk and changing your ‘self-fulfiling’ prophecy.
Use positive affirmations like,
“I love myself and am open to receiving and giving love”
“I forgive myself and no longer hold guilt around…..”
“I love myself and believe in myself enough to know I can achieve my goals”
Or try finding one that suits your needs better.
Look at yourself in a mirror while reciting your positive affirmation to yourself like a mantra. Any successful person in life or sport believes in their abilities before achieving their success.
