Award Winning Hypnotherapist | Best Alternative Therapy Provider 2026

I have just been named Best Alternative Therapy Provider 2026 at the Business Awards UK Health and Wellbeing Awards for Derbyshire.

The trophy arrived and I sat with it on the kitchen table for a while before I told anybody, which is not very good marketing (oops)

Next Chapter Hypnotherapy exists because I was the client first.

Years ago I was the one with the anxiety. 
I was fairly convinced that it was just me suffering, no-one else felt the way I did because you really become absorbed in your own head around it. Hypnotherapy was the thing that finally shifted it and I came out the other side genuinely different.

That sat with me for a good few years afterwards. A bit of a thought that would not leave: if something could change that much for me, I wanted to be the person doing it for somebody else. Eventually I stopped talking myself out of it and retrained.

The practice began as a hybrid one, in person sessions alongside online. It has since become fully online (with the exception of Stop Smoking Hypnotherapy and Stop Vaping Hypnotherapy) because I find hypnotherapy equally as effective online as in-person. 

A lot of people think it needs to be face to face but when you think how our survival brain operates, travelling to a new location with a new person can be very scary but relaxing in your safe place in the comfort of your own home is easy and we need you to relax into the experience. 

It also means that I can work globally (which I do have clients in the USA, Canada and Australia). 

I do run in-person group sessions using immersive silent disco headsets allowing a budget friendly alternative for people to access hypnotherapy so if you are local to Derby, why not come along to one of my group wellness events in Ilkeston, easily accessible from Nottingham, Derby, Long Eaton, Heanor, Ripley and Eastwood.

After going through my own experience with anxiety, I am extremely passionate and determined to help as many people as possible. 

So to have an independent panel look at all that and call it the best in the county is a strange and lovely thing.

Book your free discovery call

What the award actually is

Business Awards UK run the Health and Wellbeing Awards across the country, judged regionally.
The Best Alternative Therapy Provider category looks at how a practice is run: client care, the standard of the service, how a business operates and the difference it makes in its community.

It is worth noting that it is judged by people outside the business. When you are researching a therapist, almost everything you read has been written by the therapist.
An award is one of the very few outside opinions available to you and that is really its value.

Why I am telling you this rather than just posting the photo

Because there is a decision sitting behind it that a lot of people are stuck in the middle of right now.

Hypnotherapy is not a regulated profession in the UK. There is no legal register and no minimum training required to call yourself a hypnotherapist.
That is not a reason to avoid it. It is a reason to look properly before you book and most people have no idea what they are meant to be looking at.

Check they are registered with a professional body. The Complementary and Natural Healthcare Council, the National Council for Hypnotherapy, the General Hypnotherapy Register, and the Association for Solution Focused Hypnotherapy all require a code of ethics, insurance, and ongoing training. If you cannot find it on a website, ask.

Ask which approach they use. This is the question almost nobody asks and it matters enormously. Analytical and regression-based hypnotherapy go back through your past looking for where a pattern began. Solution Focused Hypnotherapy, which is what I do, goes the other way. It looks at where you want to get to, what is already working, and what your brain is doing in the meantime. These are not small differences in style. They are completely different experiences to sit through, and if you know you do not want to spend six weeks revisiting your childhood, that alone narrows your search.

Be wary of guarantees and percentages. "95 per cent success rate" is one of the most common reasons hypnotherapists have complaints upheld against them. I think it’s important for my clients to understand that results cannot be guaranteed and I do state this in my terms and conditions document that everyone receives prior to starting sessions with me.

Use the free consultation. Pay attention to how someone makes you feel on that call, not just what they say. You are about to spend several hours in a fairly open headspace with this person. The relationship is not a bonus feature, it is part of how the whole thing works.

What I do, plainly

Since this post has spent several paragraphs telling you to check people's training, it would be a bit rich of me not to show you mine.

I trained on a practical diploma course which covers around 450 hours of learning, practical work, case studies and building a portfolio.
This is the standard that accredited registers work to rather than the weekend certificate end of the market and I came out of it with two professional qualifications.
One is the Diploma in Solution Focused Hypnotherapy, which is the qualification the NHS lists as essential when it advertises for Solution Focused Hypnotherapists.
The other is the practitioner diploma that qualifies me for registration with the Complementary and Natural Healthcare Council.

The CNHC register is an Accredited Register, approved by the Professional Standards Authority for Health and Social Care, which is a statutory body.
General Medical Council guidance confirms that doctors are able to refer patients to practitioners on Accredited Registers.
That is the practical difference between a register that means something and a logo somebody bought.

To be completely straight with you: I am not employed by the NHS, and this is not an NHS service.
Those are the standard expectations that my training was measured against.

I work entirely online (with one exception stop smoking/stop vaping) with clients across the UK and further afield, one to one and in groups.

Sessions run on Teams, from wherever you are.
You get an audio recording to use between them.
There is homework, in the sense that solution focused work asks something of you week to week and it works considerably better when you do it.

Everyone starts with a free 30 minute discovery call.
No pressure, no pitch. You ask anything you would like to know, I like to be as open and honest as possible, so we both find out whether this is a good fit.

So… Thank you!

If you have been thinking about giving hypnotherapy a try for a while, why not book the discovery call or message me on whatsapp and we can have an informal chat about whether it’s an option for you!

Book your free discovery call, and let's talk about your next chapter.