Finding My Voice: How Hypnotherapy Gave Me the Confidence to Speak in Public with Ease

Picture the scene: Paris during a heatwave. A crowd of people is standing, wine glasses in hand, getting a little restless. A lectern is set up on a small, makeshift stage. One by one, participants from different writing workshops are called up to read a piece they’ve written.

As I hear my name, my heart races, my breath becomes shallow, and panic sets in.

It’s not complicated, I tell myself. You are reading just one page. You read, they applaud, it’s over. It’s not an exam. It’s no big deal. You can do this! Easy!

But as I start to read, I am unable to breathe. I can barely bring my voice above a whisper. The room goes quiet. I look at the faces around me—strangers. Some show clear empathy. Some look mortified. Others show a flash of disdain, or so it feels. It is just as uncomfortable for my audience as it is for me. In fact, it's plain awful. By the time I reach the last paragraph, I am hyperventilating. You’re pathetic, I tell myself, slipping away as quickly as possible. I feel embarrassed, ashamed, small, and worthless.

This was long before I knew anything about hypnosis or hypnotherapy. I was in Paris to write a novel! But I still call up that memory whenever a client comes to see me with confidence issues. It reminds me of how cruel, destructive, and belittling those self-critical inner voices can be.

In the years that followed, I relied on avoidance. I skillfully dodged any situation where I might have to speak aloud in front of others. Are you someone who has developed phenomenal avoidance skills to mask a lack of confidence or cope with a phobia? I certainly was.

But life has a way of catching up with you.

Speaking in front of an audience can be terrifying.

Fast forward a few years. I still hadn't discovered hypnotherapy, and I found myself in Washington, D.C. I had been asked to give a speech in a room so crowded they were live-streaming it into a second reception room. I tried to wriggle out of it to no avail. Speak I must. And this time, the subject wasn't a fictional novel—it was international relations, delivered to an audience who lived and breathed it. To say I was nervous is an understatement.

Thankfully, I liked the format. Four of us were sitting behind a table, miked up. A friend was sitting in the audience, three rows back, directly in my line of sight. I knew my text by heart, and I was proud of what I had written. It reflected something I cared about passionately.

When I was introduced, my palms began to sweat and my heart raced. I stared down at my friend in the audience, blocked out everyone else, and imagined he was the only person in the room.

Again, my labored breathing reduced my voice to little more than a whisper, but the microphone caught it. I put my heart into it and pushed through. It was only five minutes long, but it felt like fifty! Just as I felt myself completely running out of air, the room broke into applause. I breathed a massive sigh of relief.

That experience taught me another valuable lesson that I share with clients today: people will push through the terror, feel physically nauseous, and muster every ounce of energy they have just to survive their fear—never realizing that this is a problem that can actually be resolved. You do NOT have to just live with this. You can overcome the fear of public speaking, or any other phobia. Please know this, because back then, I didn't. I only stumbled upon the solution by accident.

When I decided to train as a regression therapist, I had to first qualify as a hypnosis practitioner. I had become so good at avoiding public speaking that I was caught completely off guard on the first day of the course. Suddenly, I found myself gasping for breath just trying to read a hypnosis induction out loud to a group of five people. I literally could not utter phrases as simple as: "Just allow your body to relax."

Luckily for me, our trainer grabbed this opportunity immediately. She used me as a live demonstration to show the class how hypnosis could remove the fear of public speaking.

She asked me to lie down and close my eyes. As I lay there, I felt like a child being told a bedtime story. My analytical mind was entirely underwhelmed. You’re not being hypnotized, it told me. Clearly, this isn’t working. You’ve got to be kidding! This can’t possibly work.

But despite the internal interference, I noticed my limbs becoming very heavy. My breathing slowed and steadied, and a profound sense of calm washed over me. In my mind's eye, I saw myself on stage in front of a massive audience, speaking with absolute confidence. It felt easy, effortless, and entirely natural. It was just me, talking clearly, sharing ideas with people who were genuinely enjoying what I had to say. It felt incredibly vivid—the way a book feels when you completely immerse yourself in the story as a child. And it felt amazing.

Afterward, I thought it was a pleasant experience, but I remained highly skeptical that it would actually change anything.

Spoiler alert: it did!

Since that day, I can stand up and speak in front of crowds while feeling absolutely fine. In fact, I had entirely forgotten that I once couldn't even read a paragraph in front of my peers until I witnessed someone else going through a similar struggle recently. Now that I've made hypnotherapy my vocation, I have helped countless others find their voice, too.

It normally takes a few sessions to get these results—three is the average. It worked faster for me because we underwent so many hypnosis sessions during our training program. That immersive experience allowed me to rebuild my core confidence from the ground up. Public speaking was just one facet of what I needed to work on to fully find my voice, take up space, and claim my place in the world.

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Ready to find your voice?

You don’t have to let fear dictate how you show up in the world, and you certainly don't have to just "put up" with it. Whether it’s a fear of public speaking, a phobia, or a quiet lack of confidence holding you back, hypnotherapy can help you rewrite that script.

My practice is currently full, but you can secure your spot for the next available opening. Fill out the quick form below to join my waiting list, and let's take the first step toward building your effortless confidence together.

12 years of being a hypnotherapy practitioner

This year I celebrated 12 years of being a hypnotherapy practitioner. So what have I learnt? First that I really enjoy it and that it works! It’s been a real joy to see so many people make the journey from smoker to ex-smoker, or to witness a client’s world open us as they finally break free of their fear of flying, or of enclosed spaces, or of heights… But those I knew about going in.

More surprising was finding out just how amazing it is at helping people sleep better. At first, it was anecdotal, people who came for other issues, reported how well they’d started to sleep, and then I started focusing in and now I have a hypnosis programme specifically for sleep.

When I think of the people who’ve had sessions with me over the years, it strikes me that the main impetus that brings you to the therapy space is usually a crisis of confidence, and I see confidence here in a wider meaning, I really see it a form of self-mastery.

Take William for instance. He came to see me because one ordinary morning he drove to work and when he got there he found he just couldn’t make himself get out of the car. I just can’t do it any more he kept repeating to himself.

Or beautiful bright Abby who became a wreck if she ever had to speak in front of an audience.

Or Thomas, who considered himself fearless until he had a panic attack driving through one of Switzerland’s many tunnels.

For William, the crisis of confidence was in the structure that underpins his life. Abby’s was a crisis in her confidence to own her place in the world. And for Thomas, it was something that we ended up tracing to the moment of his birth, when the umbilical chord wrapped itself around his neck.

So I would say that one of the things hypnotherapy is particularly good at is taking you to the root cause of something that’s causing you a crisis of confidence and giving you the means to fix it.

Now what is it not so good for? It is not a clinical method. It will not resolve clinical issues. So for example, it will help you eat better but it will not help you with an eating disorder. It will help you sleep better, but it will not resolve chronic insomnia. It will help you feel happier but it will not resolve clinical depression.

But the most important is that it will not help someone who is not willing to do the work. It is not a magic bullet. You need to engage in the process.

Looking back at how my practice has evolved over the years, the biggest change is the move from in-person sessions to sessions by Zoom. In Nice, where I lived when I first set up my practice, I had a therapy space in my home. The act of welcoming people into an albeit separate space in my home was important to me. It was the first step to building trust. It also meant that I created a safe space for clients to visit outside of their own surroundings. Just entering the therapy room started the process of creating space for their self-care.

I was very reticent about online sessions at first. They were forced upon me by the Covid pandemic and it took a little adjustment. But now, I find I like them better than in person sessions and that’s because of the three main big learnings from my experience so far.

The first is the importance of stress reduction, relaxation and prioritising rest and sleep. I would not have considered these essential elements of my practice when I started out. I thought of them as complimentary, a way to start or end a session, but not something crucial in itself. Now I think of it as vital. We are stressed out individuals walking round the planet in a perpetual state of exhaustion. I say we not because I identify with this description, if anything I am the opposite of that, but because it has become increasingly the norm. Online sessions enable people to anchor that state of rest into their daily lives.

The second is: less intervention, more exploration. When I started out, I tried to pack several interventions into one session. The time spent talking, exploring, delving into the dynamics and feel of the client’s experience of the issue they were trying to resolve I considered secondary to the desire to implement change. Now I firmly believe that the talking part is the most important part of a session. Allowing clients space and time to truly express themselves, to gain insight and clarity, to start to see their own way forward is the magic of the therapeutic process. And I find that this works well online, it’s often easier to talk in front of a screen than sitting on a couch.

And finally: acceptance trumps change. Hypnosis and regression hypnotherapy are in essence therapies for change, or that’s how I saw them: a client comes in because they want to change something about themselves or their lives. Maybe they want to stop smoking, maybe they don’t want to be scared of being in enclosed spaces any more, maybe they want to change their relationship with their mother or partner, or… I was taught that we were there to create transformation, which I read as change.

12 years later, I see things differently. More often than not, the real breakthrough is not change but acceptance. Rather than changing our feelings, it’s learning to accept them, to make space for them, to sit with them fully. Rather than changing our bodies, it’s about accepting that our bodies are magnificent and tremendous as they are. Change may well follow as a consequence of acceptance. Learning to sit with difficult feelings will improve your relationships. Learning to love your body will likely mean you look after it better. And so on… And I find online sessions lend themselves well to this more gentle yet efficacious way of working.

That said, hypnosis for change is still a tremendous tool and I love incorporating it into my sessions. I was surprised by how well hypnosis sessions via Zoom work. That was until I thought about it! In a classic hypnosis session the client is lying down, eyes closed and listening to my instructions and suggestions. When this happens whilst they are in the safety and comfort of their own homes, and listening to my voice on headphones or ear-pods, it’s not surprising it works exceptionally well.

Note: Names and personal details of clients changed to preserve confidentiality.