Using self-hypnosis to develop more confidence

There are many tools which you can use to develop greater self-confidence and self-esteem.

Among the most effective are self-hypnosis CD's and tapes - mostly CD's these days, though tapes have been very popular in the past.

Consider for a moment why you lack confidence. Throughout your upbringing, certain people of significance - that might have been parents, teachers, siblings, friends, perhaps even your TV or movie heroes - gave you certain messages again and again about who you were and how you should behave.

These may not have been very positive messages: indeed, they may have been downright harmful to you, and destructive of your developing sense of self-esteem and self-confidence.

Unfortunately, repeated often enough, these suggestions went past your conscious mind and ended up implanted firmly in your subconscious, which does not have the power to asses their accuracy or relevance to you.

These powerful negative suggestions, coming from people of significance, have made you the person you are today, with all your behaviours, good and bad, and your personality strengths and weaknesses. This includes your level of confidence in different situations.

Self-hypnosis is a means of replacing the suggestions given to you by other people with more accurate, up-to-date suggestions which more truly reflect who you are and who you want to be.

In short, self-hypnosis reprograms your subconscious mind with suggestions that enhance your level of self-confidence.

You may have seen CD's offered which work through subliminal suggestion, and you might be wondering what the difference between self-hypnosis and subliminal messages may be.

The fact is that both these techniques are ways to get past the conscious mind's critical faculty to reprogram the subconscious to provide you with more confidence. The major difference is the way the two techniques are used. Hypnosis works through trance - an altered state of consciousness - while subliminal programming can work while you're at your normal level of consciousness, so you don't have to go into trance state.

The principle in both cases, though, is exactly the same: it's a method of bypassing the critical faculties of the conscious mind, and implanting new  suggestions into the subconscious.

Subliminal messages are generally recorded on a CD with a foreground level soundtrack that prevents you hearing the subliminal message. Most of the subliminal programs on the market are sincerely marketed as genuine systems for changing behavior and increasing self-confidence.

Does subliminal programming work as well as self-hypnosis? That's a good question, since our advice is to stick to one system and work hard with it - and you want to adopt a method that will work for you. The fact is the effectiveness of subliminal programming has never been proven or disproven, though many practitioners offer testimonials to its effectiveness on their websites!

What we need to know is how much of the message is actually received by the subconscious mind. In other words, does the listener perceive the whole message or only part of it, such as the parts played loudest or longest? The answer, again, is that we do not know. A recent study from University College, London, by Dr Bahrami, shows that in fact the effectiveness of subconscious imagery - and presumably therefore subconscious audio as well - depends on how occupied the brain is on other tasks. If the brain is busy doing some conscious work, then it effectively ignores the subliminal image. Dr. Johan Karremans at the University of Nijmegen has suggested that subliminal messages may work when the message is relevant to the person in question. Unfortunately this was not an especially well conducted study.

Obviously this might imply that when a person is relaxed and listens to subliminal tapes, the conscious mind is not occupied in processing information and the messages can reach the subconscious easily.

Nonetheless, we recommend self-hypnosis tapes, because we know that they work. We know that they can bring about a major change in the level of consciousness at which you're working, and they can relax the critical faculty so that the subconscious is receptive to messages delivered directly from the CD. Needless to say this has spawned a boom in people marketing these tapes over the internet. Our objective is to guide you to the ones we know and trust - the ones that can bring about big increases in your level of self-confidence.

People have many questions about the use of self-hypnosis to gain greater confidence. To deal with a few of them:

• Anyone can be hypnotised, but only with their agreement
• No-one can make you do anything you would not normally do under the influence of hypnosis
• Hypnosis is not the same as meditation
• The ability to be hypnotised is not a sign of mental weakness, it's a sign of a willingness to suspend critical judgement and your conscious critical faculties so as to allow helpful suggestions about increasing self-confidence into your subconscious - in other words, it's a sign of a willingness to develop and grow as a person
• You'll never get stuck in a hypnotic state - the worst that can happen is that you drift off to sleep

In short, we unreservedly recommend self-hypnosis as a route to increased confidence. The program we respect and recommend most highly is featured on this page.