I have had several clients lately who have come to quit smoking in 60 minutes who have told me that to stop smoking is the biggest thing that they had ever wanted to achieve.
The interesting thing is that despite what they said they were not willing to carry out the exercises that I sent them to do before coming to see me.
Do You Really Want to Quit Smoking?
This tells me that they did not really want to quit smoking. In fact, when I questioned them more closely they admitted that they did not really want to stop smoking. They knew that they needed to quit but the want was not bigger than their need.
Quite often the desire to quit smoking was driven by ‘cost! this happens often when the price of cigarettes goes up. The success of our business is a direct reflection of the number of ‘successful clients’ we have. We are pretty protective of our reputation. I’m sure you want us to be. So, when a potential client gives their reason for quitting as ‘the cost’, we immediately ask:
If cigarettes were free, would you still smoke?
Why? Because, You (we), will always find money to do the things that we really want to do! So when money is the ‘why’ you want to quit smoking, it’s not a very motivating reason. So we dig a little deeper to find another more powerful reason. Things like family; children, pregnancy, career, ‘over it’; health; travel; fitness. These are powerful reasons. But when money is attached to another ‘dream’ or ambition… that’s a huge motivator. So think about your reason to quit smoking.
I use a mixture of hypnosis and NLP(Neuro Linguist Programming) to help people to quit smoking but the secret to its success is that you have to want to stop smoking cigarettes. it doesn’t matter what you use to stop smoking, nicotine patches, nicobate, zyban, champax, needles, will power or electronic cigarettes, you have to want to succeed for the method to succeed.
The best advice that I can give you is to get very clear in your mind WHY you want to quit. When you do this then you will find that whatever method you choose to quit smoking will be more successful.