Intention or Nice Idea?




How many times have you had great intentions to make a positive change in your life only to find you lose enthusiasm for it after a few days or weeks? 


You start off with great vigour and drive only to find yourself drifting away from your goal and going back to your old ways of thinking.

Why? Maybe your goal was a nice idea rather than a firm intention?

The Theory of Planned Behaviour (Ajzen, 2011)

The likelihood of a person engaging in a particular behaviour can be predicted by their intention to succeed.

Take, for example, the person having the intention to tackle their problem with self-confidence…

When the person believes that they will be able to be more confident rather than simply hoping that they will be able to, they are move from a desire to an intention. Likewise, when they have experience of other’s having success in a similar way, they have a greater investment in their own abilities succeed too.


Without a belief in our abilities, what appears 
to be an intention is little more than wishful thinking



Nevertheless, we must not be too hard on ourselves, because there must have been some intention for us to consider the life change in the first place. What we can learn from this is that without believing that we are going to succeed in our efforts we have less chance of sticking to our new behaviour and gaining success.

Belief is Vital

Someone once said, what the mind perceives, the mind believes and the mind achieves. The person who wants to lose weight and improve their health, has to believe that they can. By doing so, they boost the efforts they make with therapy or self-help. 

A Vulnerability to Unhelpful Beliefs Originates in Childhood

The obstacles to helpful beliefs can be numerous, but in my experience, it is often experience's from our past that has led us to believe negative things about ourselves. We are affected by what we ‘told’ ourselves about what happened. As an adult, we can rationalise them but as a child, we found it more difficult and as a result, we can make false assumptions about what they mean.

The child, for example, who didn’t believe that could achieve the same as everyone else at school, may believe that this is fact and as a result continues through life thinking they are not as clever or successful as others.

Even as an adult past unhelpful beliefs may stop them from making the necessary changes in their life to meet their goals because they believe there is little point in trying.

Analytical Hypnotherapy works to resolve those unhelpful beliefs from our past and remove the obstacles that can help a person have the confidence to turn those nice ideas into clear intentions. Rather than controlling symptoms with post-hypnotic suggestions, analytical treatment aims to uncover and resolve the underlying causes of unwanted behaviour.

What goals could you achieve if you were free from faulty beliefs? 


Find out more or contact me directly here...


Reference:

Icek Ajzen (2011) The theory of planned behaviour: Reactions and reflections,  Psychology & Health, 26:9, 1113-1127, DOI: 10.1080/08870446.2011.613995

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