More and more of us use Facebook these days, and it is a convenient means of exchanging news on a fairly trivial level. However, recent experiences have reminded me that there's no such thing as privacy, once you go online. This especially applies to Facebook.
Hypnotherapy Blog
New Year Resolutions (continued)
In my last new post I discussed how good intentions are not enough to ensure that “New Year Resolutions” are achieved. Today I’m looking at what can be done to make such resolutions more effective.
Most resolutions are about doing something that provides long term benefits, but may be difficult in the short term. If the resolution wasn’t going to help us, we wouldn’t be making it at all, and if it wasn’t difficult it wouldn’t take a “resolution” we’d just have done it already.
The problem is that the mind always finds it easier to focus on the short term. We know how we’re feeling now, and we can fairly easily imagine the immediate future. The more distant future is much harder to keep in mind. So if our resolution exchanges short term pain for long term gain, then we have a problem, because the “pain” is more vivid and immediate than the gain.
We therefore need to bring the gain into the foreground of our mind, and we can only do this through the power of imagination. We need to focus our attention and feelings on the long term gains we’re looking for, till they’re just as vivid and real as what’s actually happening already.
There’s various ways of doing this. Firstly, we should imagine our goal in a positive form rather than a negative form. For example, if we’re quitting smoking, it’s no use trying to imagine “not smoking”. You can’t form a mental picture of not doing something. Instead, you need to form a picture of the positive benefits you’re anticipating. So for example, you might imagine the health benefits by picturing yourself in the future still able to play energetically with your children, if you have young children. Saving money is not so powerful an incentive, but it helps for some people. If saving money is your goal, then you can easily visualise the money itself- maybe make it even more real by storing the money saved in a transparent jar placed where you can easily see it. Better still you can visualise what you’re intending buying with the money. Even if you intend putting most of it towards just paying your regular bills, you should spend some of it on something visible that you can see and feel.
In my next post I’ll continue the discussion of resolutions. Remember that resolutions can be made at any time- if you break this year’s resolutions you needn’t want another year before you try again.