Never get off at Ella!

I was lucky enough to go on holiday to Sri Lanka earlier in the year. It’s a stunning country and I fell in love with the place. There’s a must-do train journey that takes you through tea plantations in the clouds towards Ella, with its iconic 9 arch bridge. Hundreds of people fill the trains every day, clamouring to sit on the ‘scenic side’, or just to sit at all. They end their journey in Ella because that’s where all the guides say is the place to stop. Then they travel on foot to see the 9 arch bridge and, if they time it right, they see a train pass over it. Had they stayed on their train for one more stop they would have passed over the bridge themselves. Another stop and they’d experience a unique spiralling trainline climbing a mountainside. Yet almost everyone misses these two magnificent feats of engineering.

For me, getting off at Ella can be an allegory for how so many of us live our lives. Even though there is something better just around the corner we follow a given path, and that path holds us back.

In this case, the block is caused by accepting perceived wisdom without doing our own work. In my clients, these blockages can come in the form of fears, limited self-regard, limits that are placed on us by others - or the damage that these have done in the past, or habitual behaviour. All of these can be addressed through clinical hypnotherapy.

So if something is holding you back, get in touch and we can address it. And never get off at Ella!

The secret to why you should never say you’ll ‘try’ to ‘lose’ weight.

‘Try’ and ‘Lose’ are just about the worst two words for you to use, if you really want to reduce your weight The mind is extremely complex, and makes strong associations with certain words. Neuro-linguistically we can scupper our plans before we begin.

When we use the word ‘try’, it’s so often a soft let-down. “I’ve got something else on that day but I’ll try to get there if it finishes early” is essentially a gentle no. So to our mind, try implies fail. I have a lot of hypnotherapy clients who are trying to lose weight, or to conceive, or to stop smoking and the first thing I ask them to do is to drop the ‘trying’. In doing so, we start to set the conditions for succeeding.

So why is ‘lose’ the second enemy word for weight management? Put simply, when we lose something we are programmed to go and find it again. Whether it’s our keys or our phone, we want to remember where we last had it, to seek to be reunited. I don’t like to talk about the weight I have ‘lost’, it’s not something I ever want to find again. Choosing other words (shifted, shed, reduced, anything you like!) will mean that your mind can happily let the weight go.

There is a great deal to weight management, and so much of it is in the mind. Whether traditional hypnotherapy would help you, or other mind management techniques, please get in touch. As always, a free 20 minute consultation is yours.