**3. Goals and motivation**

I (AV) would like to share an experience I had some time ago. A friend of mine asked me to slightly change my way of dressing to become a more presentable professional, to give a different image to others and to myself. I have to admit that a part of me was reluctant to make that change, while the other one was just a little curious about what could change for the better if I follow his advice. That curiosity led me to a little inspection of my closet, with some dirty and old clothes hanging there along with some clothes that I did not really use, but there they were, and I came to realize that I needed to go get new clothes, and a new pair of shoes, because my old ones, although comfy, were starting to rip apart, and we all need a good pair of formal and comfortable shoes for formal occasions. After making the decision to go and buy some new clothes and a new pair of shoes, the instruction "buy a pair of shoes" was imprinted in my mind, nothing else.

Get inside the shop, with all those different kinds of shoes, selecting just one pair of them was a difficult task. But my mind was clear: "buy a pair of shoes." I bought a brown pair of shoes, and they were going to be worn next Monday. That day, I put them on and walked a little, and after a few blocks my ankle started to hurt. It was a weak but annoying pain. After a few more blocks, the skin of my Achilles tendon started to peel and I felt an even more annoying pain, and I remembered thinking, "But these shoes are new. Why is this happening?"

Now when we make plans, we not only use our conscious mind, but we also use our unconscious one [10]. The question here is: how?

According to some research [11, 12], our brain makes decisions even before we think we made them. Let us explain this statement. Imagine that we suggest that you move your lips to the right when you see something beautiful and to your left when you see something that you think is not. Then I show you some images on a screen. When you see an image, the information travels all the way through your visual processing structures in your brain (occipital lobe structures), then after being analyzed it is sent to an interpretation area (temporo-parieto-occipital region), and then to our decision-making structures (prefrontal region) to decide whether it is beautiful. That takes no more than a few microseconds, but it is a complex process, all happening without you realizing it. Now that you have decided

#### *Hypnotherapy and Hypnosis*

to make the movement to the left or right, your frontal lobe sends a signal to your lips to "move" left or right. That is when it gets tricky: it appears that your brain sends that last signal *before* your prefrontal region does its job.

Can we say that our decision-making process and motivation are, therefore, unconscious? If so, how can we develop a stronger will and motivation to make different or even better decisions? Some evidence suggests that the decision-making process comes from a mixture of conscious and unconscious mind [13].

As hypnotherapists, we are accustomed to "talking to the unconscious mind" [14] and that includes avoiding some of the intellectual and logical barriers that one builds for oneself. In hypnosis, that is achieved through hypnotic suggestions. Weitzenhoffer [15, 16] claims that the difference between a hypnotic suggestion and an order is the nonvolitional outcome after the hypnotic suggestion, that is, the hypnotized person does not act according to conscious will but rather in a "dissociative" mode: "it's as if the levitating arm were not mine." As Farvolden and Woody [17] find on their study, diminished activity on frontal lobe structures could be an explanation to this "unconscious" behavior. And that is the key aspect of a hypnotic and posthypnotic suggestions, the nonconscious willingness.

Now, how can we use this process to achieve goals? That is what we will be exploring in this chapter.
