Jenny Lynn (The Open Mind Therapist.com)

If you are a hypnotherapist in practice who is struggling with any of the following, I may be able to help:

• Poor client retention
• Challenging clients
• Lack of techniques
• Lack of confidence

If you're thinking of giving it a year or two before you make your mind up whether to pursue a career in Hypnotherapy or not, please phone me. 01371 859994.  The chances are you've been slung in at the deep end after training and it isn't as easy as you'd hoped it would be.  It's hard not only to get clients, but to be consistent in your practice, to get referrals, and to feel confident with your new(ish) career.  My 6 weekly meetings focus on personal and professional development as well as supervision and CPD needs.  I know how hard it can be to really value yourself and to develop your career.  That's why, with TheOpenMindTherapist.com I provide a way of deepening and developing your practice both online and offline, on the phone or face to face, individually or in groups.  Wherever you feel stuck, I can help you realise your true value.

With also nearly 30 years as a practising Buddhist, I bring an extra dimension to my work and practice.  In fact, all I'm really teaching anyone I meet with regard to my career and profession is how to see the buddha in their own life. 

As a practising integrative hypno-psychotherapist myself for more than 10 years, my work now centres on coaching, supervising and supporting less experienced therapists to be who they want to be, develop their confidence and skill base, and deliver outstanding results.

A long and checkered history takes me back to my teenage years where I failed at school.  I also failed to convince my parents that it was worth educating me any more after the age of 17 and I was strongly 'encouraged' to go to work!  Once at work, I realised that I really wanted to study and release myself from the limiting ideas I had presented to me about what I should do with my life.  So I worked hard and studied hard to get back to higher education and ended up in Liverpool in the middle of the early 1980's recession.  Liverpool was grim in those days.  From a karmic perspective, it matched my own outlook.  Low expectation, a battle with negativity: all of it was tailor made to my own personal background.  When I met Buddhism in my first year at Uni, it all made perfect sense.  I'd attracted these circumstances to me because of my impoverished inner reality.  Alot of my personal journey has since been about enriching and strengthening my inner self to produce more conspicuous benefits and better circumstances.

At age 29, after a major insight into my situation, I went to teaching college in Manchester to train to be a teacher of German and Spanish, my specialist subjects.  And I taught for a number of years in different schools, colleges and universities, often attracting controversy about my teaching style and methods.  While I was trained to deliver the subject matter in a certain way, which again I found restrictive, I would often employ very 'mobile' strategies to encourage students to learn and remember their lessons.  Sometimes I'd have kids playing games and using their kinaesthetic memory to learn with.  My first set of results at GCSE were the best the school had ever had in that subject and that fact brought me the acceptance and recognition that was due....even if fellow teachers complained about my style.

Immediately prior to that first year of teaching I married my husband.....to be ex within 3 years!  My inner world was still attracting poor choices in partnerships: men who were insensitive, manipulative or very needy, or just plain rude and this was causing me great mental and emotional anguish.  I needed to learn so much more about myself before I could find my own emotional equilibrium.  Having my daughter in many ways, caused me to have to sit up and take my life much more seriously.

My mainstay through all that turmoil has been my buddhist practice as it has enabled me to pull back layer after layer of erroneous and misguided thinking to reveal the true treasure which I've always really been underneath...and which everyone is underneath.  It has caused me to never stop questioning and to continue to challenge and push myself into situations to be able to learn.  As the scales fell away and I saw my inner beliefs and realised how they were shaping my life, I've managed to change them and to accept that I'm not able to match up to anyone else's sense of perfection.....but for me, I'm doing just fine as I continue on my path.

By the time I opted to train as a hypnotherapist/psychotherapist, I'd had 2 major breakthroughs in my life already.  One when I was 18 and the next one when I was 29.  So it was probably about time I had another one.....and lo and behold around the age of 38 I had another major breakthrough which enabled me to set up in business as a therapist.

Originally, at age 36, I trained believing I was going to be a hypnotherapist. We studied hypnotherapy techniques and grounded ourselves with some fundamental skills in counselling and psychotherapy. I studied for 3 years in a private school and went through a rigorous self development process. I naively assumed that was what training to be a hypnotherapist was all about. How wrong could I have been! It wasn't till I started to receive clients some 10 years ago now, that I realised alot of training schools concentrate on the quick fix hypnotherapy solution: a bit like the western medical paradigm "a pill for every ill" or in other words, a technique for everything! Some of these schools turned out 'qualified hypnotherapists' in 2 weekends.

What I quickly realised as I received clients through who had gone the quick fix route was that I brought something completely different to my practice. That difference is that I do not just have a one size fits all approach, and I won't try and shoe horn you into the only skills I have in my tool box. I don't have "a pill for every ill" approach either but rather I offer a fully integrated process that uses your strengths and is tailored to who you are. So necessarily, my approach uses not only my academic and personal learning, but my now well honed intuition!  And that intuition has come about from getting to now myself really well, and understanding profoundly that, if I can stay centred and maintain my emotional equilibrium, then I know it's possible for others to do the same.  I believe in the self righting instinct in the individual, even if it has been masked by years and years of erroneous thinking and mistaken beliefs.

I now not only work with people on a 1-2-1 but regularly host personal development courses and, for my professional colleagues, I provide the counselling and psychotherapy skills that are often absent in schools of hypnotherapy training programmes. This area of my expertise rests on my former experience as a secondary school teacher: class room management, development and presentation of learning materials, and offering support, guidance and appropriate feedback. In January 2012 I was made a Fellow of the National Council of Psychotherapists which is a lifelong recognition for my contribution to therapist development. I have a following of fellow therapists who meet on a regular basis who are dedicated to raising their game and delivering excellent results in their practices.