Many of my clients are referred through their company's employee assistance programme for brief, solution focused therapy. They will typically have only 6 sessions, so we need to work quickly to identify the problem and find ways to deal with it so that, at the end of the 6 sessions, the client is ready to move on with their life. To do this I use hypnotherapeutic and NLP techniques, as well as those from my original person centred counselling training. Each intervention is tailored to the individual client.

Some clients seem to be overwhelmed with several problems, so we need to identify which one to work on to make the most difference in their life. Often when one problem is resolved, the others will go away or work themselves out without further intervention.

Recently a client has asked for extra sessions. His company gives a generous allocation of eight hours but at the second session he was already worrying he would not be "better" before we had to end. This indicates to me that he thinks I have a magic wand that I can wave over him to "cure" him of his stress and depression. Of course, neither counselling nor hypnotherapy work like this. The client has to be engaged, committed and willing to make changes which may be difficult and sometimes painful, to bring about a change in their situation.


If the client is complaining about a partner, friend or child, of course we cannot change that person. What we can change is the way the client responds to or approaches them. Very often they will be having the same old argument over and over again. So they need to find a different way of responding, so their protagonist cannot keep repeating their pattern of behaviour and the circuit is broken.

And this is what I can help my clients to do, either through the use of hypnotherpy or brief counselling skills. Sometimes just talking about a problem to a non judgemental third party lessens its weight and importance. Once it is out of the client's head, there seems to be free space in the mind to come up with a solution.

So, if you don't like what you're getting, change what you're doing or, if you can't change something, then change the way you think about it......

.... with the help of Mind to Change.