Hypnotist ‘minds’ her own business

The calming voice of Elizabeth "Liza" Boubari becomes a tide, washing a highly stressed chief executive officer into a relaxed state. In reassuring tones, the hypnotherapist and Kiwanian from Glendale, California, tells the businessman to focus on a word that only he knows, such as the name of a childhood pet. This will become the stressed-out exec’s "button word," and when evoked in the future. It will ease him into a similar relaxed state, even without Liza's voice.

 

In hypnotherapy, Liza Boubari enables clients to work toward stress-free living.
"The best part of my job is that I help people heal themselves," says Liza, the owner of InnerSite, a hypnotherapy counseling office. "People know themselves more than anybody else does. Everyone has the ability to help and heal themselves. I just help them tap into that power."
Helping others has been a lodestone of Liza's varied professional experiences. Once an independent event coordinator, she also pursued careers in law and as an assistant to attorneys before settling on helping people through hypnotherapy. The thirty-seven-year-old also became a certified stress management counselor and later incorporated massage into her business.
Along with other alternative medicines, hypnotherapy, according to Liza, is growing in acceptance and use, especially for stress, anxiety, and depression. "With hypnotherapy, I'm going to the cause of the problem," she says. "With the client, we bring the problem forward, once they accept it, they can then let it go or deal with it."
In addition to relieving stress, Liza has worked with children to help alleviate attention deficit disorder, stop bedwetting, and curtail bad habits, such as nail biting or excessively playing with hair. She says most of her clients require three to five sessions; the most severe, fifteen. But she reaps more than financial rewards from her work.
"I had a teen-age client who had dropped out of school and was on the verge of suicide," Liza recalls. After about four months of hypnotherapy, he began working, dating, driving a car, was back in school, and tried out for the football team. In four months, I consider that a big turnaround.
"The biggest thrill and joy is seeing people happy with smiles on their faces," she adds.
Working toward the end of treatment and to such smiles often requires overcoming some clients' misconceptions about hypnotherapy. "First, no one can hypnotize you against your will; there has to be consent," Liza explains. "You don't go to sleep; you're aware of everything. Hypnosis is nothing but a deep state of relaxation. And you can't be made to do anything you don't want to do, such as quack like a duck, bark like a dog, or tell all your secrets."
Tying her profession and more than five years of Kiwanis membership together, Liza jokingly says she is considering hypnotizing the Glendale Kiwanis club's membership committee to bring new Kiwanians into the club every week.
Sounds like a newfangled approach to membership recruitment.
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