Paul McKenna exclusive: The world-renowned hypnotherapist comes to Brighton

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The international best-selling author and renowned hypnotherapist Paul McKenna will be coming to Brighton this March for his new coaching event, ‘Instant Confidence’. In an exclusive interview, he delves deeper into the details of his shows, books and self-help advice.  

Paul’s books have sold more than ten million copies and have been translated into 32 languages. He is one of the most famous hypnotherapists in the world, renowned for helping people with the most difficult of issues. In fact Paul McKenna’s new book ‘Freedom From Anxiety’, published by Welbeck, is available now.

He lived in LA for the past ten years but recently moved back to the UK, where he was born. Speaking on the move, he said: “I’m loving being back in the UK. It was the time of my life, a fantastic ten years, but I’ve got a lot of friends here in the UK, well, Europe generally, so it’s my favourite place to be.”

Last year, Paul toured the UK for his ‘Positivity’ tour. This year he’s back for the ‘Instant Confidence’ tour. He’s known for his interactivity in his events and sometimes bringing in volunteers from the audience. 

He said: “What I do is a coaching experience. It’s not a lecture. It’s like a personal coaching session with me, and hundreds of other people are present.

“I ask people to come up. I won’t pull them against their will. I ask the audience for a volunteer, and there are hundreds of people, so someone will want to. Once people in the audience have seen it, they know it’s going to work, so it acts as kind of a convincer.

“My coaching techniques show people they can move beyond their limitations, worries, fears, and problems. To become more resilient, confident and optimistic. Then at the end of the evening, I hypnotise everybody, and everyone leaves feeling really good, but they’ve also got techniques they can take away. Give someone a fish they eat for a day, teach someone to fish they eat for life. So they’ll have three or four things they can do whenever they’re feeling overwhelmed or need that boost of confidence.”

Paul has never done a coaching event in Brighton, so this will be the first. When asked about choosing Brighton as one of his event locations, he explained his reasons why. He said: “We pitched a bunch of places, mostly major cities. But I also wanted somewhere along the south coast, and my promoter suggested “Let’s go to Brighton,” I said, “Yeah! I haven’t been to Brighton for years.”

“The last time I actually performed in Brighton was in the 90s, and that was a comedy hypnotism show. A lot of people that are interested in personal development are in Brighton, so I thought it’s a great place to do an event.

“I intend to do this every year for maybe the next few years. Just go out on tour. I’ve done it for the last five years, and I love it. It’s not like the old days when I was playing every night. Back then, I was younger, and it was exhausting.”

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While living in the United States, Paul wasn’t touring. However, being internationally famous, he has coached in many countries. He described differences in audiences around the world. 

He said: “I played on Broadway in New York. I didn’t actually tour the United States. I did events there many times along the years, but the thing is, audiences around the world differ in different countries. Right now, self-help has never been bigger. Whether I go to Italy, eastern Europe or America, people are just hungry for it. They want techniques to help them feel better, so that’s what they have in common.”

Paul’s latest book, ‘Freedom From Anxiety’ was released in January and unsurprisingly climbed very high on the charts. It aims to help readers stop worrying, feel calmer and give them peace of mind. Paul said: “The book is about anxiety, the tour is about confidence. So they’re in the same family because if you’re anxious, you’re not likely to feel confident. So I’m interested in helping people to feel resilient, focused, motivated, and optimistic – all under the banner of the word confidence.

“There’s far too much anxiety, and there’s eight million people who officially have anxiety in this country, so it’s a big deal right now.”

When asked where he believes it stems from, he said: “It’s come from the last three years when we had a biological pandemic. We’ve also got a cost of living crisis, the economy, the war. Every time you turn on the TV, you’re under attack. 

“People have trained themselves to catastrophise worrying too much about stuff, so all their bandwidth of thinking is taken up by survival thoughts. But when you do that, you’ve got no room for joy, optimism, creativity, all the nice stuff. 

“There have been these quantum leaps in psychology in the last 20-30 years where we can now take people who are really stressed out and anxious, and in minutes get them feeling calm, resilient and in control. I’ve put those things into a book. The book comes with 18 audio techniques so you’ve got me on your phone 24 hours a day so if you’re feeling overwhelmed you can hit a button and you can focus.”

While Paul is an expert in his field and millions of people around the globe could advocate for him, he, too, experiences anxiety sometimes, as we all do. He said: “I still have problems and challenges like anyone; I’m human. Over the last couple of years, there were times when I felt anxious because you turn on the news and think ‘Crickey! this could be really bad’. So in some ways, if you haven’t had any anxiety in the last two or three years, there would be something wrong.

“We all need to at times, feel a bit anxious, stressed or worried because that’s part of living. But it’s just a good idea not to live in it because it’s not comfortable.”

He advised those experiencing anxiety to limit the activities that trigger it. For example, to those who feel anxious sometimes while watching the news, he said: “Limit your time watching the news because the news is really a collection of everything that’s kind of going wrong in the world. 

“When you look at that all the time, it distorts your view of the world. I like the news channels, but I’m careful not to take in too much, and I balance it. I watch what’s going on in the world, and then I’ll go take a walk in nature. I’ll do my gratitude and start thinking about all the things in my life that are good. If you sat and watched only news all day long, you could wind yourself up.” 

If you’re interested in learning more about Paul McKenna’s work, events, and advice, you can view his website here [LINK https://www.paulmckenna.com/ ]