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The impact of hypnotherapy trainers
As hypnotherapy trainers who are actively engaged within the hypnotherapy profession, we regularly hear about students’ experiences both whilst choosing hypnotherapy courses and whilst on their chosen course. One of the most common factors that comes up is the quality of the teaching. Whilst it is obviously important that the content of your chosen hypnotherapy course is relevant to your studies, it is how that information is conveyed that can make a huge difference in what you will end up with, in terms of skills and knowledge.
Different hypnotherapy trainers
Some training providers have one named person providing the training. The good thing about this is that you can find out about them in advance and you either resonate with their personality or you don’t, and that can help with your choice. If your prospective trainer is very fond of being the professor, or is more ‘Jack the lad’ and earthy, these are useful things to know in advance. However, at the selection stage you may not yet know much about their teaching style and what they bring to the table as hypnotherapy trainers.
Other hypnotherapy training organisations have a ‘pool’ of trainers and you may either get one trainer who is selected and assigned to teach the entire course, or you can even get different people teaching each week. Either way, it is more difficult to research the trainers in advance when signing up with an organisation such as this.
If you get one person for the entire course, they get to know your strengths and weaknesses and can, hopefully, adapt their teaching to best help you succeed. Yet if they are a weak teacher, or you simply don’t have rapport or a connection with them, then you are stuck with them for the whole course. A variety of teachers can counter this, yet on the flip-side, they won’t get to know you. Also, unless they are following very scripted training, they won’t know exactly where you are at in terms of training skills and knowledge developed from previous training sessions.
The benefits of having TWO dedicated hypnotherapy trainers
At HypnoTC you get the best of both worlds in terms of teaching, because not only do you get the same trainers supporting you throughout the entirety of the course, but there are two trainers in class (Kate and Rory), and we both teach together throughout the entire course.
You can meet us and find out about us in many different ways (more of which we’ll cover at the end of this blog). However, to give you a better idea about us, and to give you a feel for our personalities, we’ve decided to each write a little bit about the other, in order to let you know a bit about what each of us brings to the hypnotherapy training environment.
Dr Kate Beaven-Marks on co-trainer, Rory Z Fulcher
“At first glance you might think that Rory is quite simply the ‘fun one’ of our teaching partnership. In a way that is true; he does excel at bringing a sense of spontaneity and lightness that keeps students engaged. Yet there is a greater depth beneath the surface and his journey to where he is now has all contributed in different ways to how he now teaches.
Rory’s initial studies at college (he wanted to be a musician) have given him not only awesome timing, but an understanding of how people learn, and a knowledge that they can have different needs in order to keep them engaged. His earlier career as a stage hypnotist has also been of immense benefit to both his career in hypnosis, and as a hypnotherapy trainer, as it has honed his abilities to work with groups.
Not only did it build his skill in engaging groups and holding their interest, but he also quickly learned how to watch a group of people in hypnosis for the slightest changes in order to keep his shows and demonstrations on track. This is really useful when supervising a large group of people in a room, all practicing hypnosis at the same time – such as during our hypnotherapy course.
Rory’s first workshops as a trainer teaching rapid inductions may have started with smaller groups, yet even from that first event, it showed him how effective his natural style of teaching is, with each participant gaining both skills and confidence as the workshop progressed.
He now attracts a diverse range of people to his one and two day events, from complete beginners to experienced therapists and hypnotists. So much so that, on many occasions, he has had to change to a larger teaching room to accommodate the higher numbers! This leads to a fantastic energy in the room, with so many people keen to learn, getting not just knowledge and new skills, but also enjoying the process of learning with Rory, finding at the end of the workshop a wonderful sense of confidence in what they have learned to do.
Rory didn’t stop at rapid inductions though, and now teaches a highly practical stage hypnosis course. As a trainer, rather than just sitting listening to how to do it, he gets participants actively creating and practicing content for their own stage and street hypnosis routines.
As Rory is so generous in sharing what he knows, in a clear and easy to understand manner, it may come as no surprise that Rory’s books are a reflection of his style as well. Both his ‘Instant Hypnosis and Rapid Inductions Guidebook’ and the ‘Stage and Street Hypnosis Handbook’ are thorough and yet so easy to read and understand, whilst his ‘Beginners Guide to Hypnotherapy’ goes far beyond what a beginner would need and is a useful resource even for experienced hypnotherapists!
Working to our individual strengths, Rory leads on all things website and social media-related, both key aspects of our businesses (HypnoTC for in-person hypnotherapy training and Hypnosis-Courses.com for online hypnosis training).
Rory is responsible for the design and functionality of both websites and ensures that things are always running smoothly. This is no small task, given the huge range of courses and services we now offer to both our students and our graduates (including our student and graduate forums), as well as our social media channels. All this makes him the ideal person to lead on supervision for our students and graduates on website, business and social media matters.
Rory does get to spend time away from his computer as well though. As well as teaching our diploma course and short CPD events throughout the year, both Rory and I have presented at many conferences prior to starting to work together, and now we continue to do that, with the added benefits of being able to meet a vast number of people interested in hypnotherapy and also to incorporate the gems of what we learn from other presenters into our courses.
In recent times, Rory has also become a popular speaker in Facebook groups, actively demonstrating that people can effectively learn about rapid hypnosis, hypnotherapy and even street and stage hypnosis online! He’s always ready to inspire and have fun with hypnosis, whether online or out in the real world!
What does Rory bring to the classroom? As well as his own charm, fun style and sense of humour, he has an incredible ability to take complex ideas, techniques and concepts and break them down into clear, logical and manageable components. In addition, his eye for detail (he spots typos even a computer misses) means that our immense range of course training manuals are clear, concise and easy to understand, as well as being superbly presented.
Rory Z Fulcher’s thoughts about co-trainer, Dr Kate Beaven-Marks
“Kate’s previous career as a health, safety and risk manager gave Kate an eye for attention to detail, but also taught her how to be solution-focused rather than problem focused. She’s great at looking at an issue and exploring how to move beyond that (a very useful skill for any hypnotherapist and certainly for a trainer)!
With language being an integral part of how health and safety was implemented, Kate became focused on how language creates action (‘the psychology of communication’), and that led her to the amazing world of hypnosis. She quickly developed a passion for the subject, and became a hypnotherapist in her local area, and for a while she had a foot in each world, until hypnotherapy eventually won!
Years later, and I think I might be responsible (or to blame?) for introducing Kate to the joys of writing books, with the co-authoring of our children’s book, ‘Sam the Sleepy Sheep’, which uses hypnotic language to help guide children into sleep.
She has now truly caught the writing bug, with recent books, ‘How to Communicate More Effectively’, ‘Powerful Hypnosis Presentations’ and ‘Persuasive Therapy’. Like her teaching style, Kate’s writing style is very practical and pragmatic. She’s great at teaching people, no matter whether you’re watching and listening to her, or simply reading something she’s written, she always gives value and gets her point across!
Kate’s passion for hypnotherapy and helping people came through in her work with clients, both when she was working as a clinical hypnotist on the wards in a London NHS teaching hospital and most recently with an international client base (thanks to the wonders of the internet and Zoom). Her passion for all things hypnosis didn’t stop at working with clients though. Once she had achieved her initial qualifications, she set off on a route of learning that still hasn’t stopped.
Is Kate a ‘hypnosis course junkie’? Totally! This is probably a good thing, given the six years she spent immersed in hypnotherapy courses as research for her doctorate on the topic of ‘teaching and learning hypnotherapy’.
The great advantage of all Kates study (apart from the vast amounts of letters after her name – seriously, there’s a lot) is that we now use all of the really useful information, tools and techniques that she learned, and have incorporated them into our own diploma course.
Another thing that adds to the quality of our training is all of Kate’s past teaching experience. Few people know that her first ever job was actually teaching roller skating! She even taught some of the cast of the musical ‘Starlight Express’ (…which I am luckily not quite old enough to remember, lol).
In fact, she had taught throughout her earlier career as well and that helped her to naturally lead into teaching hypnosis and hypnotherapy in further education colleges, university (she taught and was examiner for the UK’s only Clinical Hypnotherapy Masters/MSc programme) and more recently, teaching staff within the NHS how to use hypnotherapy! Kate frequently teaches hypnosis and communication approaches all around the world, both in-person and online, and she’s very at home with a microphone in her hand!
In addition, although Kate was a popular speaker at events and conferences in her earlier career, she now enjoys (in normal times) going to speak at as many different conferences and events (UK and international) as she can, and I am delighted that she is giving a presentation on the use of self-hypnosis and the World Extreme Medicine conference 2021.
All of this wealth of knowledge and a ridiculously vast array of skills make Kate the ideal person to lead on the content creation and management of our courses, giving our students the most comprehensive training materials, supported, where relevant, by appropriate research, yet presented in way that shows everything we teach has been tried and tested by us! In fact, everything included within our diploma course is exactly what we both actually use in the real world to help our clients make powerful, positive changes in their lives.
Kate’s depth of training and teaching experience also helps her in her role as a hypnotherapy supervisor and she leads on the therapy supervision for our graduates and other professional hypnotherapists, as well as running a popular monthly supervision group and many other hypnosis training CPD events throughout the year!
So, what is Kate like in class? People might read this and think she’s ‘serious’, or ‘scientific’, or ‘academic’ as a trainer. Well, she can do those things, and she does at times (when the content of what we are teaching calls for it). However, she can also be humorous and entertaining, with a sense of drama on occasion (you will need to come on a course to find out more about that).
Whilst I can sometimes take rather complex information and simplify it, Kate has a rare ability to synthesise information, taking nuggets of information from a a vast range of different sources – including all of her training and qualifications and the thousands of books that she’s read – and bringing them together to create new perspectives, ideas and ways of working as a hypnotherapist and hypnotherapy trainer.
Honestly, as someone who knows a lot of hypnotherapists and trainers, there aren’t many out there who can match Dr Kate in terms of depth of knowledge and flexibility in delivery style! I’m really happy we started working together all those years ago as we truly do offer something original, and it’s a combination that really works!”
Join Kate and Rory and become a hypnotherapist
We are fast approaching our 15th cohort of students with the February 2022 Diploma Course, which is commonly regarded as one of the most comprehensive available, not just in the UK but in the world. With a strong teaching partnership, understanding what we each bring to the classroom (as well as all the work beyond the classroom, ‘behind the scenes’), we complement and enhance each other’s strengths, giving our students one great, cohesive and effective learning experience.
This isn’t just us ‘saying nice stuff’ about each other either, our combined teaching style is always mentioned by our students. Have a listen to what some of our past students had to say about learning with us, and find out more about what it is like to become a hypnotherapist with HypnoTC.
If we’ve whetted your appetite to learn more about training with us, we run regular free taster days, where you get to spend time with us in person and experience our style of teaching (not to mention our amazing training venue!), and you get to gain some useful knowledge and skills at the same time.
For those who prefer to meet us in shorter sessions, we run regular Discovery events online; these are particularly great if you have lots of questions, and you can even contact us to arrange a call back so that you can speak to us directly in a 1-to-1 setting. Otherwise, simply click the button above to learn more about joining our upcoming Hypnotherapy Diploma Course!
We hope you enjoyed this blog on becoming a hypnotherapist. If you have any questions about this topic or anything else for that matter, do please get in touch, because we’re always happy to help!
– written by the HypnoTC team
