We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Kelly Meissner a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Kelly, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today If you had a defining moment that you feel really changed the trajectory of your career, we’d love to hear the story and details.

There have been several defining moments that led me to pursuing my undergrad in Education. Then to my master’s degree in Mental Health and ultimately to becoming a hypnotherapist, but that would take too long. So, I will share the defining moment that lead me into Hypnotherapy.

I had been on my own personal spiritual journey of self development for almost 20 years. It helped me become a successful mental health professional. Still, something was missing. Not only for my practice with clients, but for myself as well. I often read self-help books, listened to podcasts, went to training to continue to work on healing my own wounds as well as learning interventions for clients.

One day I was searching for a training as I needed to complete some more continuing education hours before the end of the year. I came across an introductory training in Hypnosis and it sparked my attention. I didn’t know why as I had never really heard anything about it before other than stage hypnosis or that you are asleep or under someone else’s control. I couldn’t have been more wrong. After attending that training and learning that Clinical Hypnotherapy is nothing like it is portrayed in the movies, I realized it was a legitimate form of healing trauma in the brain.

I quickly made appointments with several different types of hypnotists (unlicensed) and hypnotherapists (licensed) to experience it for myself. Some were better than others. This is why researching their background is important. With most of them the results were astounding! The issues that I had spent 20 years working on were gone in one session. I knew this was my passion and ever sense I have studied all I can about different approaches and methods. I have over 200 hours of continuing education in hypnotherapy practices alone. I have formulated my own personal style that incorporates many different modalities and the results with my clients are profound!

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I have always had a desire to help people. The problem was, that I often couldn’t help myself. I started my undergrad as a high school math teacher. I quickly found that classroom management was not my strong suit. What I did learn from teaching was how much I enjoyed the one to one interaction. When students chose to meet with me over the lunch hour for help, I found that the most rewarding part of my day. At the same time, I was continuing on my own spiritual journey of self development. As I was learning tools to heal my own wounds and manage my own thoughts and emotions, I was inspired to work as a therapist. That way, I would get the one to one interaction that I so enjoyed and could teach all of the tools I had been practicing on myself. Over the years, I was a successful mental health therapist. After I discovered the art of Hypnotherapy, I knew I would want to go into business for myself and practice as it is intended.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

Reflecting back, I appears that word of mouth is my biggest promoter. As a Gen X, I struggle with creating content on social media. I do very little of it. Over the years, I have been very fortunate to have clients share their story with a loved one, which inspired that person to reach out to me for services. I trust that the product sells itself. The positive outcome people experience gives them energy to share about it and that in turn builds my reputation and is a self-generating marketing campaign.

Training and knowledge matter of course, but beyond that what do you think matters most in terms of succeeding in your field?

I believe the personal self-development I have been doing over the past 20 years, is the reason I am as successful as I am. When people meet me, they learn very quickly that I am a regular human who has a very practical view of human suffering. I understand that suffering, when not processed appropriately becomes stuck or trapped in the body and nervous system, causing a chain reaction of reexperiencing painful events and/or emotions.

There are pathways to healing, however, it takes work in a different way than we have been lead to believe. We believed that we should avoid painful emotions. For example, think about something else, stay busy, consume something (social media, food, alcohol, drugs). We picked this up from our culture because not many people really knew how to deal with suffering appropriately.

Due to rise in people wanting to awaken from this nightmare and information being more readily available on the internet, people are learning the truth about how to face our pain and fears and healing them with love and compassion. This is what I teach and lead people through in Hypnotherapy.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.hypnotherapywithkelly.com
• Instagram: hypnotherapywithkelly
• Facebook: Hypnotherapy With Kelly