How To Break the Habits That Limit You with Hypnotherapist Christina Woods

Listen to the full podcast episode to learn about the science-backed practice that has not only changed my life but also the lives of countless people over the last two decades. This is something you can’t ignore if you want to achieve that great goal you identified for this year and write your new future.

In 2019, I was attacked by two men in a parking lot. After this experience, I began to respond to harmless situations as if they were dangerous. For example, when I would walk out of a door at a department store and someone was standing there, I’d respond as if I was being attacked.

Because of this, I became fascinated with the subconscious mind. Shortly thereafter, I discovered hypnotherapy, a form of therapy that talks to the subconscious mind in a way the mind listens. After trying hypnosis, I found I was calmer and the old triggers no longer set me off. And this was not just as it related to the attack but in other areas of life where I felt anxious or guilty for reasons that were not logical.

I found hypnotherapy to be a remarkable way to create profound behavioral change and began using it with my clients too. The results they saw were profound.

That’s why I was excited to have Christina Woods join us for this episode. Christina is a licensed Rapid Transformational Therapist®, clinical hypnotherapist, empowerment coach, and reiki master. She combines her background in corporate leadership with her life experiences in dealing with trauma and abandonment to empower other women to trust their intuition and set themselves free of self-doubt.

As the CEO and Founder of Wise Woods Hypnotherapy and Coaching, Christina has extensive experience working on complex challenges and pulling potential out of others so they can become even more extraordinary.

95% of what we think about ourselves, how we perceive the world, and how we feel comes from our subconscious.

Hypnotherapy allows us to quiet our conscious minds to tap into our natural subconscious state and get to the root cause of the behavior, pattern, or feeling we’re experiencing.

“It’s like gardening – you don’t just chop everything off the top, you literally need to pull out the root, or it’s just gonna keep growing.” – Christina Woods

Hypnotherapy is becoming more mainstream as people begin to realize the power of our minds. Everyone from doctors, lawyers, and athletes to stay-at-home mothers are now using hypnotherapy to shift how they view past experiences so that they can rewrite the stories that no longer serve them.

“It’s never too late to have a happy childhood if that wasn’t what you had. You can literally rewrite your story.” – Christina Woods

Our habits and patterns of behavior today are often determined by experiences we remember from the past. Sometimes we’ve interpreted events in a way that causes us to become emotionally stuck. These moments that we attach meaning to often stem from our childhood.

“To be able to look at that now and say, ‘Oh, they had to pick me up late because they actually had two jobs and were trying to get there on time. Wow, I can see how much they loved me and were trying. They were doing their best now, but at the time, I was the last kid picked up in the dark. It felt like nobody cared about me then.'” – Christina Woods

Trauma is like a tight muscle; hypnotherapy allows you to release that tightness so the blood can get through and start circulating again. It enables you to understand what is blocking you and reframe these memories so your subconscious can release them. When you begin to acknowledge and process one experience, it can have a ripple effect and positively impact other areas of your life.

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The Epidemic Of Not Feeling ‘Enough’

We live in a world of comparison and keeping up with the Joneses. Social media has wired us to never feel good enough, smart enough, skinny enough, and even spiritually enough.

Christina has found that most of her clients feel this way because somewhere along the line, they stopped trusting themselves, stopped listening to their inner voice, and gave away their personal power.

“If I get that raise, if I do this thing, if I look that way, then I’ll be enough. […] When we do that, it’s never enough; it’s a constant chase.” – Christina Woods

When we feel inadequate, we break down and fail to set boundaries, leading to resentment and a cycle of negative emotions.

Christina’s solution is to not only find the inner voice and believe that you’re already enough but to truly feel and become the person that already has what you desire.

Most of us start backward by saying, “I’m going to do this, then I’ll have this, so then I’ll be happy.” What we really need to do is start at the frequency in line with what we want so that we can naturally decrease the cognitive dissonance between our thoughts and actions. We need to get comfortable with the uncomfortable so we’re not unwittingly self-sabotaging.

“It’s easy to become the over-doer, the hustler, the victim, one of these archetypes, when we’re trying to be enough.” – Christina Woods

This memorized state can become so ingrained in us that we wonder why we can’t change or why we keep returning to the same place, even when our external circumstances change.

Breaking the habits that limit us from the change we want requires that we work with the subconscious mind in the way the subconscious listens.

Christina’s Practical Tips For Reprogramming

The Morning Ritual

Christina’s approach extends beyond in-person hypnosis sessions. To start reprogramming the subconscious, she recommends a morning routine incorporating stillness and self-reflection, even for just a few minutes. Journaling and meditation are simple but effective ways to listen to your mind without distraction.

Journaling – An easy prompt to start with is ‘I, (your name), feel….’
Meditation – If you’re new to meditation, start with a couple of minutes per day. Think of a moment in the last 24 hours when you felt calm or positive, close your eyes, and allow that moment to move through you. This exercise can also be used when you’re feeling triggered.

In this episode, Christina shares:

The importance of understanding and reframing traumatic experiences that can block you from moving forward in your life
How hypnotherapy helps to tap into your subconscious and uncover the root cause of beliefs, emotions, and behaviors
What you can expect in a hypnosis session and ways to start reprogramming your subconscious today

Connect with Christina:

Resources and related episodes:

Tune in to the previous episode, Leading (and Parenting) in Uncertain Times
Listen to episode 21: Using Hypnosis to Overcome Your Blocks in Business
If you’d like to be notified of when new podcast episodes are released, you can do so here: Playing Full Out
Learn more about the Inside Out Method
Connect with Rita on LinkedIn

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About Rita Hyland

With over 20 years of experience as an executive and leadership coach, Rita helps leaders — emerging and established — excel in corporate and entrepreneurial environments.

Rita believes if leaders were more clear about how transformation really works and more intentional about creating what they want, their impact, success, and influence in the world would be unstoppable.

Through her coaching programs, private coaching, and masterminds, Rita shows leaders how to win consistently and create the impact and legacy they desire.

Central to Rita’s work is the understanding that you will never outperform your current programming, no matter how strong your willpower.

When you learn to use Rita’s proprietary Neuroleadership Growth Code, a technology that uses the best of neuroscience and transformational psychology to hit the brain’s buttons for change, YOU become both the solution and the strategy.

Her mission is to end talented, hard-working, and self-aware leaders spending another day stuck in self-doubt or confusion and not contributing their brilliant work and talent the world so desperately needs.