3 more golden rules for choosing a hypnosis course

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Three more great tips to help you make sure you choose the right hypnosis course for you.

By Mark Tyrrell

I enjoyed Joe's excellent article Two golden rules for choosing hypnosis training, and I thought I'd jump right in with my own thoughts on this important subject. After all, we've been running hypnosis courses for so long I can't help but have opinions on the matter!

Choosing the right people to learn hypnotherapy from is vital. One of the easiest ways to tell whether a school is really confident in what it is teaching is to check how grounded in research it is. Is it up to date? Or does it promise to teach you everything and nothing?

I've distilled this thinking down into three important precepts for identifying a good hypnosis course.

• A good hypnotherapy school knows what it's doing

Be wary about hypnotherapy schools which promise to teach a whole raft of different approaches. The ones whose brochures offer:

• analytical hypnosis
• Ericksonian hypnosis
• direct hypnosis
• mesmerism
• past life regression
• etc

Like an engineering course offering to teach 'jet propulsion, wagon wheel technology, flying carpets...'

A sure sign that people are not fully confident about what they teach is when they offer a smorgasbord of different theoretical approaches. In psychology, as in mechanics, there has been both an evolution and an evaluation. Not every approach is as 'valid' as every other. Mental health, like mechanics, is too important for such sloppy thinking. We have to understand what works, and discard what is found to be unhelpful or confusing or even directly harmful. This is an ongoing process.

• A good hypnosis course involves learning by doing

Imagine if a would-be car mechanic was just given books to read or video to watch and never touched an actual engine. How good a mechanic would they be?

A hypnotherapy school should ensure that while you are learning you can work not just with other students but with members of the public who have come forward with real problems they want help with. Of course it's useful to work with your fellow students, but nothing beats doing fully assessed therapy sessions with real clients. This should be on your list of 'must haves' when you are selecting your course.

• Good hypnosis training teaches you how things really work

Any school you consider training with should confidently teach you the basics of how the brain emotes and this should be informed by up-to-date research.

Many people still have doubts about hypnotherapy as a valid psychotherapeutic approach because of a lingering association with nebulous New Age-y concepts such as 'energy fields' and 'spirituality'. There are readily available and verifiable neurological and physical explanations for all hypnotic and psychological phenomena, and this should be the basis of your teaching, not mysterious and inexplicable 'woo'.

A further warning. Any school presenting itself as a 'spiritual system' rather than just a psychotherapeutic training institute is likely to be working along cultish lines. This carries personal risks for you, and is likely to render you less effective when you set out to earn your living in the therapeutic 'market place', which has steadily (thank goodness) been becoming more rigorous in the demands it makes of therapists.

And lastly, it's important that you like your trainers and their results. Can they demonstrate their psychotherapy? Do they have years of experience? Are the people who have trained with them previously now effective and respected therapists?

You can learn How to Stop Anyone Smoking with Mark Tyrrell on our Smoking Cessation Training Course (online).

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