There is an obvious contradiction happening around AI and therapy, including hypnotherapy and it’s many modalities. On one hand, we are using it constantly to do stuff like write proposals, create social posts, build websites, generate content, summarize documents, and give us quick answers to mundane questions like ‘What kind of spider is this?’. On the other hand, many practitioners are still over-occupied with the idea of AI taking over their practice.
I’ve read so many posts that start with “Is this going to replace me?” which, to me, sounds disingenuous with just a smidge of hypocrisy. Are they fear-mongering for clicks? Because chances are the person asking the question is already using it for other stuff. Either way, I think that asking whether or not AI is going to ‘replace’ us is the wrong question. The more suitable question is, “What parts of my work should AI never replace, and what parts of my work am I wasting too much “human” energy doing myself?”
For practitioners, coaches, hypnotherapists, therapists and other transformational work professionals, the most valuable use of AI has nothing to do with replacing the human interaction. It can help us do a ton of work that normally chips away at our valuable time! For exampl: prepare for sessions, organize client data, manage growing caseloads, track what happened across sessions, remember what we promised to send, identify behavior shifts, and eventually reduce the cognitive overload that starts building once several active cases are competing for space in our human heads. That is where I think the real opportunity is. You see, the goal isn’t to make us think less or hand over our responsibilities to some super intelligence. The goal is to stop forcing ourselves to manage our practice using outdated, inefficient tools. I’m not saying everyone should jump on the AI bandwagon but you should at least explore what it can do for you beyond writing scripts or generating images for your blog.
Take for example: BURN OUT. I know how quickly that cognitive overload can happen because it happened to me and it happens to a lot of us. We burn out, it’s a real thing! It doesn’t happen because we’re helping too many people. It usually happens because we’re helping people plus running a business plus managing the marketing plus creating the schedules plus follow up, preparing for more sessions, and the list goes on.
In my case, once the caseload started stacking and I had seven or eight clients per week on a cycle, I found myself struggling to do things like manage the case files, I couldn’t clearly remember what I said in the last session, or the post hypnotic suggestions I had given. Don’t even get me started on the hypnosis audio recordings! That was another chore for me.
I had these notepads and my computer was bursting with session recordings. Sometimes it was hard to read my own chicken-scratch and listening through a recording just to remember exactly what the clients said while in trance was ridiculously time consuming. But I didn’t have a choice, I had to build systems for myself because there was no practical software or infrastructure for hypnotherapists.
We already do highly cognitive work as it is. We listen, interpret, observe, adapt, and move in and out of hypnotic trance with the client ourselves and making precise decisions in real time is part of the work. Adding a second job as an administrative memory machine is not fair to us or the client and it’s not necessary anymore.
There was a time a few years ago that I DREAMED of having a second ME, like my own CLONE that would do all of these little admin tasks for me… only better. My dream came true.
AI now helps me carry that informational and organizational burden, and now I have more mental bandwidth left for the person sitting in front of me. It actually makes my job much more enjoyable. I have so much more time to focus on the transformational work, it’s EXCITING again. Practically no time is wasted on stuff like sifting through piles of notepads, analyzing spreadsheets, tracking client progress manually, organizing my schedule around Free Consultation or assessment calls.
And this is why I think the current conversation about AI and how it’s going to steal our jobs is so incredibly shallow. We’re asking the wrong questions.
If all you are doing with AI is creating colorful graphics and writing scripts, you are barely scratching the surface. AI can become part of the infrastructure of your practice. It can help you assess more people faster, which means you can help a lot more people than you do today without sacrificing your time… which means what? More revenue, growth!
It can structure information before a session, surface patterns across a time, handle your progress tracking, handle all of those reminders and follow-ups, and help you move through that admin part of the work more efficiently.
The human still interprets. The human still decides. The human still connects. No AI can take this away from us, I don’t care how Super it is, the HUMAN element will remain at the heart of what we do because… people need people and it’s just that simple. AI can handle the tedious complexities around the work.
The fear around AI is totally legit in certain professions because the technology is moving quickly and people are indeed going to lose their jobs, but that’s because they’re refusing to accept the reality. Instead of learning ways to seize the opportunity, they’re fighting it. It reminds me of all of those people that mocked the ‘internet’ in the early 90’s.
Fear can also keep us focused on the wrong problem. Practitioners don’t need to compete with AI. We need to learn how to contain it, shape it, and make it useful. The future of hypnotherapy and it’s many modalities should not be AI replacing human wisdom.
It should be AI extending what human wisdom is capable of achieving.