Kia ora

Who is this guy, Andrew Hardwick, and what's his story?

 

For over 3 decades I built a career as a General Nurse & Mental Health Nurse. My nursing career started in 1981, at a difficult time in my life. I was 20 years old, and my mother, Eva, had just passed away unexpectedly. I was a grieving, immature, shy boy from Walsall, a coal mining town in the West Midlands of England, still raw and hurting in my grief. Along with my family, Nursing helped me survive. It taught me that everyone needed help at some point in life, and I didn't want anyone to go through what I had gone through, without someone to care for and support them. It was a time in which I started to really learn how to communicate, how to care, and how to help people. Basically, I grew up! As a General Nurse I worked on an Orthopaedic Unit, Ear, Nose & Throat (ENT), spent time in Elderly Care, an Emergency Department and a Tuberculosis Unit.

 

With a solid foundation in hands-on nursing care, a love of anatomy and physiology, plus a keen interest in Psychology and understanding human behaviour, I took a sidestep into Mental Health Nursing.  It was through caring for people in Acute Mental Health, Rehabilitation, Day Hospitals, Community Mental Health Nursing and a Post-Brain-Injury Behaviour Modification Unit that I learned how to relate to and help people going through their mental health journey. I learned how to measure motivate and elicit positive behavioural change.

 

At various points in my nursing career I grew other aspects of my people skills in management roles. In Barnsley, South Yorkshire, I was Manager of the Nurse Management Information System, an I.T. position from which I led a 6 year project which resulted in the first paperless nursing information system in the UK NHS. Since moving to New Zealand I have worked in 2 of the Wellington Hospitals. I was Quality & Projects Facilitator for the Women's Health Service at Capital & Coast District Health Board, covering Obstetrics, Gynaecology and Maternity Units in Wellington, Porirua and the Kapiti Coast. From there I moved to Southern Cross Hospital, a private sector surgical service provider, where I worked as Quality, Health & Safety Manager, as well as being a Nurse Assessor.

 

Nursing taught me the value of evidence based practice in the planning of treatment, backed up by rapport building skills and a large focus on confidentiality and informed consent. All of these are transferable skills, which I make considerable effort to infuse into my own services today.

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What sparked Andrew's interest in Hypnotherapy?

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I first encountered hypnosis at The Manor Hospital in Walsall, my birthplace. The year was 1981, and I was just 4 months into my nursing career. In the Emergency Department (ED) a young girl of around 9 years old had been brought in by her mother. She had fallen and broken her wrist. The little girl was clearly in pain. But more than that, she was terrified. She needed to have a needle for both anti-tetanus and pain control, so that the wrist could be set. Her distress was so great that she was kicking, screaming, spitting, biting and scratching anyone who went near her, including her very distraught mother.

 

At that time, the ED was taking part in a research project coordinated by the AQCH (Association of Qualified Curative Hypnotherapists), whose headquarters were conveniently situated across the road from the hospital. The project involved clinical research into how Hypnotherapy could be effectively utilized in an ED. One of the Doctors secured informed consent from the little girl's mother to hypnotize her daughter, so that treatment could be given. As I had been involved in the girl's admission process, I was also given permission to watch the girl being hypnotized.

 

The little girl closed her eyes. To my astonishment, less than 20 minutes later she was sitting up, giggling. She said her arm tickled as the needle entered it for an anti-tetanus injection. She calmly watched her wrist being set, then with a signal from the Hypnotherapist she went back to sleep. They gave her suggestions that she would sleep very well at night and would be happy, content and her arm would be comfortable. I was astounded!

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Since that eye-opening day I have learned all that I could about hypnosis and Hypnotherapy, whilst also working full time as a Registered Nurse. For decades I studied hypnosis from afar, but due to my nursing work I did not manage to create the time for formal Hypnotherapy training until I left the UK for NZ. One of the goals I set myself when I migrated to NZ was a 5 Year Plan to change career from nursing to Hypnotherapy.  

 

Consequently, 5 years later, Andrew Hardwick Hypnotherapy opened on 12th February 2009

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What I love about Hypnotherapy is that it's partly science and partly art!

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The scientific aspect of Hypnotherapy comes from repeatable outcomes achieved through using techniques developed by past experts in the field over many centuries. Although some claims are apocryphal in nature, more recently neuroscience is demonstrating what hypnosis can achieve.

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The artistry of Hypnotherapy comes from story-telling, metaphor, and painting pictures with words in your mind. In modern technological terms, your brain is the hardware, your mind is the software, and thoughts are the HTML code of the mind. Your actions, reactions and responses are the consequence of those thoughts. Hypnotherapy essentially uses hypnotic persuasion techniques, suggestion, to Cut, Copy & Paste thoughts, thereby changing the resultant actions. This is how, for example, a smoker can become a non-smoker, or how a person lacking the confidence for public speaking can be helped to give a keynote speech. All minds are unique, and so the artistry comes from finding out which words will be the best brushstrokes for each individual

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In other words..."How may I help you?"

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