Valerie started her working life, like many, in the achievement-driven world of high performance sales. During her 7-year career with Lancaster Partners, a large UK publishing company, she set sales records never before accomplished. Invariably, if not the top salesperson, much of the time she was rarely out of the top three of sixty travelling sales reps, and she earned more money working a 3-day week than the Prime Minister at the time. It was the late 70’s and just the time when independent papers were starting to be published. She co-owned a ‘What’s-On’ entertainment magazine which is where her writing career started.

Unfortunately the after-effects of a serious car accident prevented her from continuing her sales career. But it was both her success and the varied experiences she encountered in this industry that encouraged her to develop the necessary skills in order to explore an area for which she felt a natural calling – journalism.

“Like many, I worked long days as a lone sales agent, both in the UK and the USA. Competing in a target driven world of appointments, communication, sales techniques and the constant reminders to maintain self-belief and conviction was an excellent environment to learn quickly about human nature. There were some fascinating characters in that lifestyle! After the accident I was not able to work for a year and I realised a change of career would offer me the additional excitement I wanted, and allow me to use the skills I had learned and develop those I knew I had naturally.”

Ten years covering the Cannes Film Festival, a life in Hollywood as a trade editor for the film industry, and launching two popular London-based cultural magazines with her son Philip formed the background for an impressive early career where understanding people was always crucial to success. She was subsequently a regular columnist in a Film Trade magazine also run by her son in London. She later opened an office in Fleet Street and worked with the newspaper industry as a freelance journalist writing and selling stories and photographs to the media.

Because of the 1978 near fatal car accident which led to some difficult years of amnesia she started to take an interest again in hypnosis, the therapy that had helped her regain her memory. She found she thoroughly enjoyed it and that is what brought her into a career in hypnosis. The very unlikely beginning of a remarkable career as a respected, admired and sought after therapist and motivational psychologist.

Emerging from such a life-shattering event, it was to be witnessing and developing first-hand the tools of hypnosis that enabled Valerie to rebuild her life. From this experience, she has devoted the past 30 years to the study of hypnotherapy – the remarkable treatment responsible for her cure, and that of many others.

Austin’s career in hypnosis gained national press attention with her famous ‘Stop smoking in One Hour’ technique.

Her Diploma course in Advanced Hypnotherapy started life as a corporate training course in 1990, primarily designed to increase productivity. She also became interested in the therapeutic and medical applications of hypnosis and has refined and developed her own techniques in order to train potential hypnotherapists in the skill of age regression.

Continually researching, developing and refining her techniques, Valerie has spent many years lecturing and teaching workshops in the USA, Europe and Asia, she established a research institute on the paradise island of Langkawi in Malaysia and gaining international recognition.

Valerie has specialized in her advanced techniques for increasing individual and group productivity, stress control, and teaching efficient psychological systems and strategies to help keep the highly-trained business mind free of obstacles that can lead to poor performance, ill health and even breakdowns.

Valerie has continued to develop and refine her Advanced Hypnotherapy Master Diploma Course and regularly appears as a VIP guest speaker at selected conferences and workshops, as well as continuing research into the treatment of addictions and alcoholism in association with various medical bodies.

“Hypnosis is the only therapy that allows you to get into the mind ‘filing system’ and bring forward critical information that creates the quick and efficient changes. No other therapy can do this in such a short time and with such a high success rate. With my techniques the obstacles in the mind can be eliminated and the client can lead a normal life. Radical life enhancements are also possible with relative ease, as the speed reading and stress management parts of my technique illustrate. But what is so important is that my techniques can be trained. I know if the hypnotherapist I have trained follows my techniques to the letter as they too can have an extraordinary success rate.”

As the author of seven best-selling books with an established Harley Street clinic, and an internationally successful career as a lecturer and personal trainer, Valerie knows the power of the media intimately, and how to use it. The media coverage of her ‘Stop Smoking in One Hour Technique’, for which she became most famous, prompted international press interest, televised conferences, interviews and government level approval.

Self Hypnosis, published by Thorsons in 1992, continues to sell and has been adopted by many hypnotherapy schools as required reading for students. Free Yourself From Fear was the follow-up, focusing on common fears and phobias.

Slim While You Sleep was unique in that it used 'hypno-sleep' as part of the technique, by giving suggestions why you are asleep to lose weight.

Stop Smoking in One Hour was first published in Malaysia to coincide with the endoresment of the technique by the Health Minister and later revised and published in the UK in 2001 by Blake Publishing.

Hypnosex was the first book of its kind to focus on using hypnosis to improve relationships.

She was commissioned by Dr Abdul Halim Othman, Dean at the University Kebangsaan, Malaysia to teach her Advanced Hypnotherapy course to a selection of teachers, students and a professor at this leading University of psychology. The Health Minister of Malaysia, Datuk Lee Kim Sai, and leading academics gave her technique – used in a special addictions unit – personal approval and Datuk Lee Kim Sai was televised giving his approval for her ‘Stop Smoking Technique’ as he presented her graduates from the University with their diploma for her 7-day advanced hypnotherapy course.

“Working on Langkawi, a magical island in Malaysia, where I wrote my first book in 1993, was an important period of development for my technique. When you work with such a small community, in such an intimate place the challenges are immense. What you do simply has to work, and work well, or your credibility suffers and everyone soon knows and you would no longer have a practice! In this way it was an important test centre, and the lessons I learned are important foundations of my constantly evolving hypnotherapy courses.”

Valerie Austin

During her time in Kuala Lumpur, she was also brought in to lecture at the then new University Malaysia Sabah. In 1997, she lectured at the Industrial and Organisational Psychology: Challenges in the Third Millennium conference on ‘Hypnotherapy among Employers in Crisis’ and at a conference for over 150 teachers at the Jala Turan Campus also at the University Malaysia Sabah.

As the founder of Austin Corporate Ltd, Valerie offers comprehensive training in Corporate Consultancy, providing a blueprint for qualified hypnotherapists to approach businesses and offer the type of corporate consultancy services Austin Corporate offers. With the increasingly volatile world economic climate, more and more businesses require help with maintaining the health and well-being of the workforce. Increased workloads and pressure to perform, employees are in need of the services Austin Corporate can provide. Stress management, increasing productivity, accelerated learning and problems with fatigue and sleeplessness are just some of the areas Valerie has a wealth of experience in.

She is also a co-trainer, alongside her author and researcher husband James Pool, on the Austin Diploma Course in Medical Hypnosis, the first course of its kind to be validated by the General Hypnotherapy Council and made available to non medical practitioners.

As well as training her 7-day Advanced Hypnotherapy Diploma Course, Valerie hosts many of the Continuing Professional Development practical Workshops for Certified Austin Trained Therapists, corporate consultants and students of the Medical Hypnosis course. The guest speakers are often from abroad, bringing a fresh and dynamic approach to the subject area of hypnotherapy.

In 2004 alone, Valerie trained over 1,000 people in the safe and effective use of self-hypnosis during an intensive season of 2-day workshops.

Valerie’s is one of the few hypnotherapy training schools that teaches ‘pure’ hypnosis, which has historically been proven to work without the additional complication of modern techniques.

In 2011, Valerie held the first Austin International Hypnotherapy Conference at Shepperton film studios with guest speakers Larry H. Elman and Jerry Valley from the USA, and a variety of other UK-based speakers. Two further conferences were held in 2012 and 2013 with a wide variety of speakers including psychiatrist Dr Alan Sanderson, focussing on subjects related to hypnotherapy such as Mesmerism, marketing and corporate clients.

In recent years, Valerie has helped two close friends use self-hypnosis to help them through their ordeal of dealing with a cancer diagnosis. When her good friend, Criminal Attorney Inger Garcia, was diagnosed with Stage 4 breast cancer, Valerie revisited the research about Self Hypnosis and how it could treat cancer. The result was that with Valerie’s guidance and help Inger was able to shrink the tumour and stop it spreading, changing the diagnosis to stage 2 and she is now in full remission. Inger and Valerie subsequently embarked on a project to seek out and interview experts in the field of cancer treatment and produced the film “The Face of Cancer” which was entered in, and was part of, the 2013 Cannes Film Festival.