Last Summer I wrote an article entitled why I think hypnotherapy students and hypnotherapists love the attraction of hypnotherapy. Do have a read.
I wrote about the love that people in this field have for this field and the reasons I believe that it happens.
In the past week I have spoken to a LOT of hypnotherapists. I have been talking to them about how to develop their businesses, how to earn more money, what to do in order to grow their business, and how to do more of what they love in their business rather than stressing and worrying and becoming overwhelmed with all the stuff they believe they need to do.
That’s the thing with the field of hypnotherapy, virtually every hypnotherapist I spoke to told me of his or her love for doing the actual hypnotherapy and working with clients. Very few shared my love of developing one’s hypnotherapy business, but heck, that is a discussion or another day. Though if you are interested in mentoring with me, just visit this page on my website to get details of how I do that and when I’ll next be taking clients.
There is a classic expression often used in personal development circles and within the field of self-improvement; “do what you love and you’ll never work another day in your life.” It seems to make a lot of sense initially. In theory, if you are loving what you are doing each and every day then it does not seem like work. On many occasions since I began working in the field of hypnotherapy back in 1997, nearly 20 years ago, I have commented that it feels like I do my hobby each day. I teach, train, research, write about, and get to therapeutically share my chosen field, which is one that I absolutely love. When we spend so much of our time in our working role, it is going to influence our lives greatly overall if we love what we do.
Many of us have been told at one point in our life or another to “do what you love” and while that’s a noble aspiration to agree with, it’s sometimes just as important to flip the equation and figure out how to love what you do, or like it just a bit more. I am not suggesting that you stay doing something that you loathe or that makes you unhappy. Everything that we do can be made more enjoyable, or we can take control of how we react to it and engage with it.
Additionally, if you are doing what you love, it doesn’t mean you will always love what you do. You can have days and sometimes longer periods of time when you may feel bored, stressed, or stuck. Every professional pursuit of love presents challenges and stressors from time to time. It is not just set in stone that we love it the same way forever. Sometimes you may feel that you aren’t advancing in your career quickly enough. Sometimes you may feel like you are in over your head. Other times, you may just get sick to the stomach of the amount of pseudoscientific bullcrap that gets associated with your field by the ill-informed and those who perpetuate nonsense (though that last one might just be me getting a tad carried away….).
On this journey of ups and downs, it is first important to do what you love. Doing what you love starts you down a good path. But it’s even more important to then learn to love what you do. There’s a difference.
In this way, a career is like a marriage. We marry who we fall in love with, but that event is only the beginning. We have to choose to stay in love with our beloved ones with our thoughts and actions every day. We marry who we love, and then we need to love who we marry.
Keeping a marriage requires dedication, ongoing consideration, communication and so much more that I’d need to write another series of articles to do it justice. It is when people take their marriage for granted or stop working on it, or just expect it to be the same all by itself as life goes on that issues occur with it.
Here are 7 ways that you can derive more consistent enjoyment from what you do:
1. Create A Vision:
Some days are more enjoyable than others. To consistently love what you do, you need to have a clear vision of what you want to accomplish. According to Simon Sinek, we need to “Start with why.” We need a “why” that goes beyond today.
When we have a quality vision, we become an individual with a mission that fuels, inspires and drives us, and in turn that promotes the love we have for it.
Many help stimulate their vision with a board of some kind. There’s no right or wrong way to create a Vision Board. Our brains are wired to be inspired by what we see. These visuals and images stir our emotions to make sure that our thoughts are being flavoured, reminded and stimulated and in turn they go to work to make our visions a reality.
Having a vision requires awareness of oneself too though. You cannot be responsible for things you are not aware of, so when you create a vision for yourself, you need it to be underpinned with self-awareness and an awareness of one’s own thoughts, bias and processes.
2. Set Effective Short-term Goals:
It’s important to have a long-term vision for what you want to accomplish, but it’s easy to get sidetracked and frustrated if you don’t have a more concrete plan for getting from here to there. Setting short-term goals helps you focus on how your daily activities contribute to your grand vision.
A study by McKinsey at Oxford University in 2012 found that breaking long-term projects into smaller, short-term projects is effective in achieving success. These short- term goals are easily managed, modified to accommodate any changes, or paused altogether.
The evidence base regarding goals suggests they should be written down, they should have enough challenge to make them demanding and worthwhile, but not too challenging that they are stress inducing.
With those goals in place write up a motivation review regarding them; write up all the reasons you wish to accomplish the goals and remind yourself of the reward that awaits you upon accomplishment of them.
3. Celebrate Milestones:
Looking to the future gets you refocused and ties the good feeling you feel while celebrating milestones. This step is the key to getting the momentum of success rolling. Done consistently, the pace will pick up and you’ll begin rolling from one success to the next in quick succession. You’ll become a veritable rolling snowball thundering down a mountain side becoming an avalanche of success (the current cold spell is clearly influencing my writing today!).
Furthermore, it helps you to recognise the progress you have made, no matter how slow it seems to be. Levi King, CEO of Creditera, warns that there can be a danger to celebrating too much, too early. Instead, celebrating milestones in simple, yet meaningful ways reminds you of the progress you are making.
Celebrating our success builds enjoyment and love into what we do for sure.
4. Get Over Ourselves:
Sometimes your daily lives get mundane or difficult because you are too focused on yourselves. You are worried about what you are getting out of your careers and what other people are doing for you. You should instead focus on how you can make your clients, customers, peers, and colleagues more successful too.
As you lose yourselves in serving others, your success and happiness will take care of itself. Like Zig Ziglar says, “You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help enough other people get what they want.”
There is so much material out there to illustrate that by serving others, you go on to love what you do much more deeply. Upon lying on your deathbed, will you wish you’d watched more television or played more video games? Or will you wish you’d served more people, loved more people and spent more time being deeply present with other people?
5. Change Your Way of Thinking:
Relish problems and learn from them.
Communicate effectively with yourself.
Adopt a progressive, supportive relationship with yourself.
Mindset will affect the quality of your work and how you regard it. If you keep thinking that you don’t like an activity, there is no way you can enjoy it. Instead, think of the long-term benefit you will derive from the activity, or focus on the lovely interaction you have with the people during the activity – seek to benefit in some way from it. With anything I start to convince myself that I do no enjoy, or that I struggle to find any inherent value in, I’ll consider utilising the time by being mindful while engaging in the activity and derive the benefits of that.
Be patient. Accept that progress sometimes takes time. Perfection (your interpretation of what that is) or an ideal outcome is only likely when you have gone through some failure. Learn from your set backs and aim to do better. Don’t beat yourself up when you fail, learn from it. You only really fail when you quit.
When you learn from your ongoing experience, it fuels a love for what you do.
6. Spend Time With Passionate People:
Be with people who are in the place you wish to be.
Be with people who love what they do.
Be with people who feel good to be around.
Be with people who make you laugh and smile.
Be with people who stimulate you.
Be with people who support and encourage you.
Be with people who are honest with and tell you the truth.
Work with people that have similar goals, drive and business ethics. You should hang around with people who you know are passionate about the activity and who share goals with you. They will give you the energy to stay positive and even enjoy what you are doing.
Share the love affair with your project and that love grows exponentially.
7. Embrace Change:
Zen masters teach their students to meditate upon the beauty of impermanence. The ancient Stoics would meditate upon similar notions, such as imagining life without certain people or elements in it, so that you understand the impermanence of life and are ready for it. Embrace change before it becomes a necessity. Change stimulates, invigorates and creates growth.
I have mainly focused on how to maintain love for the path you are on here today. However, sometimes it’s simply time for a change. Rake up the leaves on the surface and let new shoots of life begin to sprout up and grow into something even more beautiful.
Learn more about embracing change with self-hypnosis:
Improve Your Life: Creating an Internal Library of Change with Self-Hypnosis
Every year, with the marathons and ultra marathons I compete in, I insist upon spending time on each run and training run truly tuning in to the experience, being mindful, taking in the experience and enjoying it for what it is. Not just thinking in terms of what it’ll do for me. Heck, I have spent so many hours running in the last 15 years that a large section of my life would end up being meaningless if it was all just about how I fared in races or when crossing the line at events.
The key to staying on the road to success is enjoying not only the destination but the journey itself. If the journey has too many barriers to overcome this could cause you to breakdown and give up altogether. Be realistic, celebrate your victories and pat yourself on the back every once in a while. Enjoy what you do and work at rekindling your passion regularly!
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Have some of themes here resonated with you? Then have a read of these pages:
1. Do you need help or support in a particular area of your life?
Coaching with Adam Eason Or Hypnotherapy with Adam Eason
2. Would you like a satisfying and meaningful career as a hypnotherapist helping others? Are you a hypnotherapist looking for stimulating and career enhancing continued professional development and advanced studies?
Adam Eason’s Anglo European training college.
3. Are you a hypnotherapist looking to fulfil your ambitions or advance your career?
Hypnotherapist Mentoring with Adam Eason.
Likewise, if you’d like to learn more about self-hypnosis, understand the evidence based principles of it from a scientific perspective and learn how to apply it to many areas of your life while having fun and in a safe environment and have the opportunity to test everything you learn, then come and join me for my one day seminar which does all that and more, have a read here: The Science of Self-Hypnosis Seminar.
