Hannah.Christy Podcast 1.Nurse Coaching & Hypnosis
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Christy: This is Christy from the Calm Collective Care, and I'm here with Hannah, also from the Calm Collective Care. And we thought today we would just have a conversation about Nurses, Nurse Coaching, this whole process of Hypnosis and NLP and what it means to us. So if any of those terms provide you with any sort of curiosity you're gonna wanna tune into this conversation.
Welcome to the Calm Collective Conversations where nurses explore hypnosis, coaching and the mind-body connection in everyday practice. I'm Christy Cowgill, nurse anesthetist, psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner and board certified hypnotherapist. Today I'm joined by Hannah and we talk about nurse coaching hypnosis and what happens when language becomes a healing process.
Hey Hannah, good to see you. It's so good to see you. I'm so glad we're doing this today. I know we've been [00:01:00] talking about it for a while, haven't we? Quite a while. Yeah. I think it's much needed. Yeah, it is. So what brought us together as two amazing nurses was the concept of how to incorporate.
Hypnotherapy or hypnosis into our nurse coaching sessions. And then what we did find out was we also live in the same state. So I am in Newberg, Oregon and
Hannah: I'm in Florence at the beach a few hours away. But grew up in Portland, very close to Christy, have spent a lot of time out there. So yeah, definitely a kinship there.
Christy: That was kind of the, the cherry on top when I was like, Hannah, where do you live? And yeah. So we've actually been able to meet in person. So that's been kind of fun. Really fun. Yeah. So I'm gonna start, first, my biggest question for you that maybe people wanna know. So first and foremost nurse coaching, you know, if you could even just give us your elevator [00:02:00] spiel on what nurse coaching is, and then why after becoming a nurse coach, did you seek out another modality for helping your clients? Yeah.
Hannah: Great questions. So, my elevator speech for nurse coaching is really my role as a nurse coach is to help my clients figure out what's most important to them and how to best fit that into their.
I think a really good example of this is you know, having someone come to you and say, oh, well, you know, my doctor says I need to lose 20 pounds to better my weight. And my question is always, well, is that what's most important to you right now? Because if someone has an unbelievable amount of work stress or home stress, relationship stress, if they aren't sleeping because of some reason if they have kind of these other things going on, those are definitely gonna take precedence over.
Maybe losing 20 pounds or maybe losing that weight isn't gonna be possible if you have [00:03:00] these other things that are going on. And so kind of putting the focus back on them and what's most important to them in that moment. And then those other goals are gonna be met or can be, you know, achieved at a later time.
So that's kind of how I look at what nurse coaching is and. When I discovered hypnosis, I volunteered to be a client for someone who was going for their hypnosis certification. It just felt like the missing piece for me, and I really, after the experience was it was so powerful for me personally.
But then afterwards it was honestly just like a light bulb went off and I was like, oh. I was like, this is what's been missing for me in my own journey. And then. I think this could be so beneficial for some clients and I found, find that it really has been. So, yeah. Yeah. I hear you.
Christy: Thank you for sharing that.
I forgot that you were like a [00:04:00] participant as a Yeah. A volunteer for a student that was going for the certification and yeah. Changed my life. Yeah. Right. Yeah. In many ways, and I'm sure I, and I have so many questions just about that, having you go back in time and remember some of your misconceptions that you might have had about hypnosis.
Yeah. And. I too, I became a nurse coach after 20 years in nursing. I became a nurse coach in 2019. And I love the dimensionality of asking clients more the motivational in interviewing type questions, like what's motivating them towards the change that they wanna do and really holding that space for somebody to really be seen and heard and have their perspective of what's going on in their life shared.
And, as hypnotist or as nurses who are using this process of hypnosis. Hypnosis is a meditative and motivational coaching tool, right? So we use the process of hypnosis [00:05:00] to motivate somebody to help that motivation process, right, to really put in action what they wanna do, or we can also use it as a meditative tool to really allow them to really reflect, like you said, on what's important to me and why.
You know, and really kind of, instead of doing something for their doctor, because their doctor said, or because their spouse said, or because society said, right. Yeah. Really kind of allowing them to find What is important to you? And then why is it important? Because that why it's important is gonna be what motivates them to make any sort of change. You know, it's gonna motivate you to do one thing or the other, right. Is gonna be your why, you know? So I love that. And since I added hypnosis into my coaching process with clients, I feel like the change has happened. Like when I saw you even talking and those of who are [00:06:00] just listening to the audio, there was this big smile.
It was life changing to add hypnosis to like have that experience. And I've also found when I add that on as a process that I take my clients through it really accelerates the change because they really start to step into being able to see themselves in that, with the change already made, they get to see and hear what it sounds like to have made that change. Like who's gonna congratulate them first and really get to the feelings of success before it's happened? And hypnosis in a nutshell, to me is like, whatever we conceive in the mind, the body achieves. So what the mind starts to conceive, the body achieves, you know, and we hear that all the time.
You know, negative self-talk leads to, oh, I'm feeling down on myself. And, and I think that's really true. Yeah.
Hannah: Do you see hypnosis as a standalone thing? Do you think it works well with other [00:07:00] interventions? Like where do you see it fitting in with with clients and with people?
Christy: Yeah. I mean, I think hypnosis fits in as a process tool in any dimension of coaching, right?
Anytime that somebody is wanting to. Think differently, feel differently, or behave differently. I think that hypnosis is that tool that can really accelerate that, that change. It goes beyond just talking about something or asking another question and answering it, right? Of course, sometimes we do need to do that, like list out the pros and the cons, but at the end of the day, we're gonna make a decision based on how we feel about something.
And hypnosis is the realm of the emotion and how we feel. And so I do see that as a tool and I also think that we. Make hypnosis more than what it really is. You know, hypnosis is really just a [00:08:00] focused attention on an imagination process, right? And we do this all the time. We do it all the time.
If we're worried about something, you know, we're imagining that something might take place and how we're gonna feel when that happens, right? So we as humans are actually really good with focusing on something and making something up, and then having a feeling about it. We could also be focused on something.
Um, in the positive way. Right? That's not worry. And I think this is where we have less strength. We don't have as much memory muscle memory there. We're good at worrying, but we're not really good at seeing ourselves successful. So when we can just invite somebody into that space to like, well, what does it look like when you've achieved this?
What are you gonna be able to do? Instead of focusing on what they can't do or what their diagnosis is, you know, I think that opens up a lot of opportunity. So I argue oftentimes that hypnosis [00:09:00] is just how we use language, and we can do that with eyes open in a conversation. Mm-hmm. And I think there's some people that are really gifted at that, you know?
Mm-hmm. Automatically. Or if we need to go back and learn the skill, we can use hypnosis in in conversation and coaching. Or we can use it as kind of a standalone modality for some of our, our more clinical what we call clinical hypnotherapy, where we actually have a problem and then we're actually doing a lengthier process to fix the problem, you know?
I can think of like medical conditions, like bedwetting we can use it for dermatologic issues, you know, lessening the impact of eczema seasonal allergies, you know, so those would be kind of more processes where we're going in and actually doing some complementary and alternative sort of holistic process to help that person with the symptoms of a condition.
Yeah.
Hannah: Amazing. I love what you were talking about you know, focusing on what people want [00:10:00] instead. And I'm still amazed at this idea of how we know what we don't want, and it's always so amazing, you know, asking clients or myself, you know, well, what is it? What is it that you want? And people will say, oh, I, I wanna be less stressed.
Like, I wanna be less angry. I wanna be less frustrated. And then, you know, when you ask them, well, what, what do you want instead? Like, what's gonna replace that? Sometimes there's just like blank, you know, just like blank stares. And it's I think difficult for people sometimes to connect with that flip side of the coin.
Okay, well what are we, what are we gonna give you instead? Like, what are these positive things that you wanna be feeling? So I think just that focus of the, kind of the negative and what we don't want is, you know, a byproduct of so many things and no one's fault by any means. And so I think, yeah, it's just a really.
Powerful skill to start kind of asking, you know, what, what do we want instead? What do we wanna let go of, [00:11:00] um, and what are we gonna make room for?
Christy: Oh, absolutely. It reminds me of a metaphor, you know, and I've heard this before and I actually don't know who to attribute it to it. So if somebody's listening and knows who, who said this first, let us know.
But it's, you know, our human mind, we have, negative things are like they're, they stick to us like Velcro, right? Yeah. And positive kind of slides off us like Teflon and you know, and it's so true. If I went in back in the day when I was, you know, working for somebody and would go in from an annual review and of course, you know, get high marks.
Oh my gosh, Christy, we love to have you on the team and you're doing so well and here's what you do great, and you're, here's what your patients say about you. And then they would have that one little thing that I could improve on. Right. Yeah. I would, I would walk out of that after hearing all of the positive, getting almost a perfect score, getting a pay raise and all of that.
And I'd be like, oh man, they don't like me 'cause of da, da [00:12:00] da. And I would, I would just be so focused on that negative part yeah. And. It's so I relate so much. It's so, it's so true. Yeah. Oh my gosh. So, you know, maybe the advantage of us as nurse coaches learning this tool of hypnosis is, you know, it really is an exploration of the mind body experience, right?
It is a holistic tool that's. Totally within the scope and standards of nursing in the scope and standards of holistic nursing, hypnosis and hypnotherapy are both mentioned 10 or 17 times throughout that manual. So it just does become a way that we can converse and help to reframe our clients.
Perspectives or our patient's perspectives and even you know, for those people that are still working at the bedside for the nurses there. Right. I had a very clinical career for a long time in [00:13:00] anesthesiology and it was amazing after I learned what language could do and how. Hypnotherapist were so gifted at language that I could really, in two or three sentences, take a preoperative surgical client who was in a lot of pain and had a lot of fear and a lot of anxiety, and with two or three sentences just completely changed their inner world.
It would be reflective on their face and you know, you'd see them finally take a big deep breath and just relax down. And then, in the hospital we also have the advantage to see their blood pressure and their heart rate just regulate just like that. And. The opposite is true as well. There's sometimes that we're asking questions in healthcare that actually create a nervous system reaction right away.
How much pain are you in? What's your pain score? I worked in surgery so I [00:14:00] don't often hear, are you nauseated? Right? And just that question makes somebody go inside and kind of check in, am I nauseated? And you know where I'm going with this? I bet Hannah, right? Yeah. You almost give them the idea.
Yeah. You give 'em the idea and you know, we, we joke and hypnosis like, okay, what I want you to do right now is not Think of a purple elephant. Don't think of a purple elephant. No matter what you do, don't think of the purple elephant. How is that going for you? Right. Are you thinking of an all I can see, you have to think of a purple elephant all can see to not think of one.
Right. So yeah, it would sometimes just learning like what how words can really hit our nervous system and, and change our state right away with, without us knowing anything, right? Without us being consciously aware of what's happening. We've shifted, you know? Yeah. [00:15:00] Very cool. When we started this, we said we're both members of the Calm collective care.
Do you wanna share with people who are listening what that is?
Hannah: So the Calm Collective Care is a collective of amazing nurses and hypnotists. And we all, bring our own flavor and our own experiences and our own kind of specialties. There are some of us who really are.
Skilled and gifted on working with presurgical patients. Focusing on pain focusing on birthing. So we all kind of bring our own experience and expertise into the world of coaching and hypnosis. And having that I think, kind of collective support is really empowering for us as practitioners.
And then also I think really exciting for clients too, to look and see, wow, look at all these different areas that one hypnosis can be helpful with. Mm-hmm. And wow, look at all these different people who specialize in so many different things. [00:16:00] So we offer individual sessions. We offer some group sessions and yeah, we're really, really proud and, excited to be doing this work and offering this kind of like robust, offering to people.
Christy: Yeah. Yeah. I think it's really great. We've had between eight and 10 nurses on our team at any given time. We're about a little over a year old, I guess. But it was really formulated in order to allow the public and people seeking out hypnotherapy to.
Find a resource where they could pick a practitioner. And it's been really successful in that. And also, I don't feel like I'm an island all by myself now. Being a nurse who knows knows how to do hypnosis. Now we have a team of across the country and actually across both the US and Canada of nurses who.
Are trained and certified in this skill and offering that. I think that's nice [00:17:00] too because we get to talk about complex cases or troubleshoot what would we do differently or what should we offer? And I think that's an advantage as well. I think that's really great.
Hannah: And I think part of our expectation coming from, our nursing background also, like nursing is a team sport.
You know, you're not in there. You're not in there alone. So having that, yeah, teamwork and comradery, I think. I think only benefits us and only benefits the clients that we see.
Christy: That's right. And collectively the Calm Collective has, we have recorded most of our group sessions into audio files, so now we have a fantastic library.
Anything from and you could name some of your favorites too that you might remember, but anything from self-confidence to seasonal affective disorder. To chakra balancing
Hannah: Joy. Chakras. Some skin stuff. I just re-recorded, re-listened to that one yesterday. [00:18:00] Yeah changing the seasons and even pain.
Working with your kind of inner child I think is one of them. Yeah. There's like quite an amazing collection.
Christy: And then for the women who are listening, we have quite a few on PMS symptoms and also menopause relief. So some of these things, that are really. Nagging symptoms that people have.
Like I, I am 50 and so I will say that I'm in that perimenopausal state and sometimes those hot flashes can be overwhelming and. Hypnosis is self hypnosis. So when you work with a nurse coach who knows hypnosis, they can teach you strategies so that way you're able to change that hot flash into, I actually, it's not too bad at all.
And usually that just takes one session. It's like this mental rehearsal that is just so nice. I love the fact that now we have, I told, I, I said we were about a year and a half old. I think we have. We've recorded almost one per week for [00:19:00] the last year. So we have over 50 different audio recordings.
And so if you were to visit our website you can go and listen to a couple, no charge at all. And then if you wanna get the whole library, and we're always updating that, we're always adding new ones there. So yeah, something really, truly for everyone. Exactly. Well, thanks for the few minutes and chatting about nurse coaching and hypnosis has been great.
Hannah: It's been so fun. So fun. All right, hopefully we'll get together again 'cause I know there's so much more we could talk about so much more. I, my brain is full with ideas. I'm gonna get off and write them all down. Awesome.
Christy: All right, see you later, Hannah. Bye.
If you are curious about hypnosis nurse coaching or exploring the calm collective care team or library, just visit our website at
[00:20:00] www.enterintocalm.com/calm-collective-care
Christy: we offer individual sessions, group sessions, and a growing audio library of guided experience. If this conversation sparks something for you, share it with another nurse who might benefit.
