Helping Leaders Own Who They Are

There is a word which keeps coming back every time I talk about hypnosis, yet is not present enough in people’s lives. This word is: imagination. Now, this is just a word, but when you think about it, when you think about what imagination REALLY evokes for you, it opens a limitless internal universe…

Imagination is the faculty of the mind to form and manipulate images. Imagination is, in a way, what makes us human. It is what we, as a species, have, that other animals don’t. We can imagine. Hence we can create, choose to evolve and project ourselves. We constantly create our reality based on how we imagine the future we want to have. Who do we want to be? What kind of job do we want to do? What country do we want to live in? What is the idea we have of ourselves? We use our imagination to create ourselves, moment by moment by moment. Yet we end up not doing the job we want to do, not feeling the way we want to feel, not living the life we want to live. We end up fearing things we would like to appreciate. We end up adopting habits which harm us, and ironically, which we are consciously aware of! Where is our imagination when we need it? How can imagination be such a powerful thing, yet leave us so powerless? Well here’s the thing: we use our imagination constantly, but we fail to use it in a way that is most helpful to us.

Our self-image is perhaps the most powerful driver in anyone’s life. Therefore it seems pretty obvious and crucial that you better be in control and actively shape this image you have about yourself. But most people don’t. They don’t actively engage into using their imagination to create the life they want to create. Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying you need only imagine to have something in order for this thing to suddenly appear in your life. Assuming otherwise is just wishful thinking. Change takes time, and everything is what it is in its own time. But if you never imagine, I mean REALLY and actively imagine what it is that you want, you will be unlikely to ever get it. However… if you allow yourself to simply begin to imagine, and let your mind wander, and not curb its flow with all these superficial barriers and fake rules that we (too) eagerly entrap ourselves in, then you might just surprise yourself when you end up getting what it is you created.

Hypnosis is not about somebody making you do things. It is about a person asking you to use your imagination in order to create for you an altered perception of reality. And subsequently, this shift will enable you to begin creating new understandings, new ways of being, empowering you through life. The cliché of the hypnotist having magical abilities is nothing more than what it is: a cliché. The idea that someone has special powers and can control minds is simply an illusion. As Einstein said: “Reality is a persistent illusion, albeit a very persistent one”.

What I believe in, is that all of us have a wonderful capacity to change. We all have this gift to make sense of things, and more importantly to CHANGE the way we make sense of things. We can do this through our imagination. This untapped potential every individual has within them. As the character embodying Christopher Morcom says in the movie: “Sometimes it’s the very people who no one imagines anything of, who do the things no one can imagine.”

At the end of the day, it’s all about the imagination game; and I wonder what you could achieve, if you were to FINALLY start imagining.