Hi, Arthur. What you're talking about is pretty much what master hypnotists and master NLP practitioners focus on - what I refer to as "heart's desires."
You might hear more about what clients are consciously focusing on -- losing weight, stop smoking, pick up chicks, find romance, be confident -- and at the same time the therapist is helping the client to achieve their conscious desire, they're also using their tools to get the client in rapport with their unconscious mind: their deeply held values, beliefs, attitudes, and sense of identity.
So the client (including when the self is client) gets positive results that spill out into areas of their lives that the client wasn't focusing on consciously.
For instance, a client who wants to stop smoking may be being stopped by her unconscious belief that smoking is her way of getting a break. Her unconscious mind "protects" her ability to take breaks by preventing her from giving up cigarettes. The skilled NLP practitioner or hypnotist helps her to find new, better means of getting what she unconsciously wants, without having the old, unhelpful behavior, and the client develops all kinds of positive inner resources out of that -- things like courage, healthy boundary-setting, boldness, calm, peace, attractiveness, and connection -- that would have consciously seemed to the client as totally unrelated to giving up smoking.
Plus, getting consciously in rapport with your unconscious mind, and helping others to do it, too, is just plain fun!
