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ust as evidence-based medicine cut through ineffective treatments in health care and helped to identify what works, results-based hypnosis cuts through unprovable methods of hypnotherapy and provides a practical framework for helping clients get results with hypnosis. Pioneered by the founder of The Morpheus Clinic for Hypnosis, results-based hypnosis is a reaction against mysticism in hypnotherapy.

1. Reality trumps theory

There are many theories about hypnosis, suggestibility, the subconscious mind, belief systems, the root causes of problems, how your past affects your present, and so on. Theories can be very useful for predicting what techniques will get certain results, but when your experience doesn't match a theory, it would be a mistake to fit the reality of what's happening into the theoretical model. Results-based hypnosis deals with reality, and has no loyalty to theory.

2. Your experiences after hypnosis are more important than your experiences during hypnosis

Contrast results-based hypnosis against relaxation-based hypnosis or "feel-good" hypnosis that doesn't want you to feel any pressure or anxiety.

Change doesn't always feel good. Results-based hypnosis will push you out of your comfort zone, challenge you, and make you think in ways you have never thought before. If you spend 1 hour a week being challenged, and the other 167 hours a week being a better, happier person, we're doing our job.

Some clients who "don't feel hypnotized" end up experiencing profound changes. In the end, only the results matter.

3. Our job is to help you get from point A to point B, and it's up to you to define those points

We're not here to tell you what's wrong with you, or how you should live your life. When you begin hypnotherapy, you'll tell us what you want to change, and what your goals are. Our job is to help you get from point A to point B, and to correct your course until you reach your goals.

4. Our plans are only useful until your plans thwart them (but that's part of the process)

Many hypnotherapists will follow a script they wrote before the session began. That's like pointing a car toward a destination, putting on a blindfold and flooring the gas. It can work... if everything goes according to plan. But if you have blocks or limitations getting in the way, such a hypnotherapist will never know or be able to do anything about it.

A results-based hypnotherapist solicits your continual feedback during a session, which means that your verbal and non-verbal feedback determine the progress and structure of your session. That way, we're able to respond immediately and effectively to any problems or objections that arise, and ensure that you continue to follow us closely throughout the session. We also ask you to report on the progress you make between each session, so that we can structure your entire program based on the results you notice in the real world. When you're sitting in our passenger seat, we drive with both eyes on the road.

5. Being a hypnosis client should not require a leap of faith

Concepts such as past lives, chakras and energy meridians are not only difficult to prove but, for the most part, cannot be used to obtain reliable results. We use concepts that you can understand rationally or intuitively, and which you can verify through direct experience. If it can't be verified, it's not results-based.

6. We succeed by being more flexible and resourceful than you are

If you've had a fear, habit or limiting belief for some time, you've developed many ways to keep the problem in place, and you've imagined many reasons why you are "broken." If you have more ways of keeping the problem than your hypnotherapist has of fixing the problem, he or she cannot succeed.

In order to help you overcome the problem, we have been trained in a wide array of tools that deal with limiting beliefs, which we deploy as needed. A results-based hypnotherapist remains highly flexible and responsive during a session, while keeping an eye on the final goal, the same way that an NHL player skates an elaborate path around opposing players before finally shooting the puck into the net.

7. Results-based hypnosis leads to elegant change

Repeating the same suggestions over a number of sessions is a poor substitute for skill. Using repetition to overcome a problem is like using a battering ram to break open a door for which a key can be found.

When a hypnotherapist is able to uncover relevant subconscious information, he or she can "find the key" and produce elegant change—that is, results obtained without repetition, unnecessary steps, or suggestions that elicit resistance from the client. The results-based hypnotherapist strives for elegant change in every session.