Following on from our last blog post, here are a couple more tips on choosing the very best hypnotherapy course that you can find. We’ve already covered:
Not choosing the first course you see
(do your research)
Not choosing the cheapest option
(cheap isn’t always best)
Checking for legitimate testimonials
(reviews are important)
Ensuring the qualification is real
(some trainers may try and trick you)
So, in this post we’re going to cover four more important things to keep in mind when you’ve decided you’re ready to train to be a hypnotherapist. So here goes…
Don’t be blinded by certificates
Many sub-par hypnotherapy trainers attempt to trick people into doing a crappy hypnotherapy course by offering a bunch of certificates upon completion:
Unfortunately, most of the time these types of offers are a load of rubbish, and the certificates aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on! A lot of these disreputable companies will give out a ‘hypnotherapy certificate’ to anyone for just attending their course, regardless of whether said person can actually demonstrate their knowledge of the subject or not, so remember; Certificates don’t always = knowledge!
The main things that you should be aiming to get from your hypnotherapy course are knowledge, experience and confidence – confidence that you have enough knowledge and experience to actually begin using hypnotherapy once the course is over! Having a nice, big certificate at the end of the course is an added bonus, but it shouldn’t be your goal. And if you really, really do want a certificate, please ensure that it is actually worth having!
Make the right choice between ‘intensive courses’ and longer options
Although the idea of getting your hypnotherapy qualification ASAP might sound great, intensive courses are not for everyone. Similarly, longer courses can be too much of a commitment, both in terms of time and money, for some. There isn’t a ‘one size fits all’ hypnotherapy course, so you need to work out which type of course will be best for you. Choose the one that works best for you, and that fits with your learning style and your lifestyle. For example, many longer courses are held at the weekends, whereas intensive courses tend to be held on weekdays. But intensive courses tend to be a little more budget-friendly.
The key thing to remember, is that after your course, whether 5 days, 20 days or even more, you will still be learning. Hypnotherapists who have been seeing clients for months and years are still learning. Even the world’s best hypnotherapists have trained continuously for years to get to their level, but it all needs to start somewhere.
If you want to learn a new skill, whatever it might be, you need to do your research and find the very best training you can possibly afford (not the most expensive, but the best). Allow yourself to treat yourself to your very best learning experience, because if it’s something you’re truly passionate about, you owe it to yourself. You owe yourself the opportunity to achieve all that you know you are capable of, in the most effective environment possible. You owe yourself the very best hypnotherapy training for you!
Content is King!
There’s been a huge buzz about ‘content free’ hypnotherapy training recently. If you’ve been considering a course offering these methods, let me stop you right there and burst your bubble, because although content free hypnotherapy can work sometimes, the results often only tend to be short-term.
A friend of mine was on a training course to learn some content free techniques, and the trainer told a story about how he ‘fixed’ a woman’s life-long phobia of leaving the house in just one session, “without even knowing anything about the problem”. And yes, this woman did leave her house, she even went to the shops, but a couple of weeks later, she was back at home, and back to her old ways (and probably worse than before, if I had to make an educated guess). Content free solutions will often only mask a problem, instead of getting to the root of the problem, and digging it out.
The way I and other effective hypnotherapy trainers teach, is ‘solution focused’ – i.e. focusing on creating a bespoke solution to each particular client’s problem(s), using various and different approaches. Behavioural changes, metaphors for change, direct suggestions, analytical approaches, future pacing, visualisations, regressing clients back to past events to effectively deal with the issue… Those are just some of the things you should be learning as a hypnotherapist.
The content free crowd teach techniques such as: “Imagine your problem, imagine it as a shape, give it a colour… Now change that shape, and change the colour of it. Now integrate that new shape back inside, and you’re fixed.”
Now honestly, that alone isn’t going to do many people much good at all, and if you’re paying someone a chunk of money to teach you about hypnotherapy and you learn to talk about shapes and colours… well, you might be better off finding a decent pre-school (it’ll be much cheaper, and probably equally as effective).
Note: Yes, that is a real content-free technique that people are paid to teach. If you need to take a course to learn how to do that, hypnotherapy probably ain’t the career for you…
Keep it Real
Online training alone is great if you want to learn how to do Facebook Marketing, or a business management course, or learn some other theoretical-type subject, but if you want to learn something practical, you’re going to need to actually practice it. That doesn’t mean online training is bad, in fact, far from it. Our own online hypnosis and hypnotherapy training is among some of the best in the world. However, if you want to learn to be a hypnotherapist, you’re gonna need to practice doing hypnotherapy with people, and it also helps if you can get feedback from a tutor/mentor, to make sure you’re doing it right. So, by all means do some online training, but make sure you get some live, real-world experience too!
When I personally started out in the hypnosis world, I took an online NLP ‘diploma’ course. To pass this online diploma, you’d have the difficult task of reading an NLP book (provided), and re-wording sections of the book as answers on your exam paper. That was it. The people running the course didn’t give a flying fart whether I actually knew NLP by the end of the course (I didn’t). Nobody cared whether I could actually do the techniques from the book (I couldn’t). But I passed anyway, and I got a certificate to say I knew all about something that in fact I absolutely sucked at.
I did eventually learn NLP, but it took months to learn and years to perfect, not just a few hours/days. It took study, research, experimentation and dedication. So, if you’re doing an online hypnotherapy course, make sure that it’s a part of your overall learning process, and just because some online courses give you a ‘certificate’ along with the course, that doesn’t necessarily mean you are ‘qualified’!
If you are looking for good online training where you have to earn your certificate by passing exams and actually knowing what you’ve learned, then check out our online training here:
Get the training you deserve
So, now you have another four useful tips about how to get the best hypnotherapy training, I hope you’ll keep these tips in mind when looking for a hypnotherapy training course, and if you have any questions please don’t hesitate to get in touch with me personally. Whether you train here at the Rory Z Hypnosis Academy or somewhere completely different, what’s important (to me) is that you are trained well, and that you leave the course knowing what you’re doing!
Good luck with your journey towards helping others with hypnotherapy!
