Session #322: Bob Martel on the Business of Business Hypnosis

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This is the Work Smart Hypnosis Podcast, session number 322, Bob Martel on the Business of Business Hypnosis. Welcome to the Work Smart Hypnosis Podcast with Jason Lynette, Your professional resource for hypnosis training and outstanding business six. Sets. Here’s your host, Jason Lynette. You know, it reminds me of an interesting story.

I’ll tell you in advance that very often in recording these conversations for this Work Smart Hypnosis podcast series. Very often, just like as we work with our clients, I begin with a specific premise as to why I’ve invited someone onto the program. Yet, the more we end up talking, the more we hit on some rather interesting themes.

That often become universal and start to just open up a whole new world of possibilities of how we can better work with our clients and attract our ideal clientele. And I’ve actually known Bob Martel out of Massachusetts, I’d say for going on about, it’s gotta be at least 10 years. at this point, and he’s someone that I knew of his background working in the Navy, working on submarines.

A bit of a background working in corporate world, which he’s gonna talk about here in this conversation. Yet the applications of how eventually being hired by a group of hypnotists to better support their marketing, to eventually becoming a hypnotist as well, and letting it all really come full circle.

Letting it all really come full circle in terms of now how he works with people from a variety of different backgrounds, but from his knowledge of working with sales and marketing, working with a lot of people who are business owners, entrepreneurs in terms of their confidence in terms of their own self value, their own, and how so many elements of Bob’s story kind of intertwine.

And you start to see some of the through lines in terms of how we can better. Our clients. That being said, I’d also mentioned we’re gonna spend some time working and talking about the writing. Of esop, ESOP’s, fs, things like the tortoise and the hair, the north wind versus the sun, and these classic stories in terms of how we could integrate them into our hypnotic change work.

And trust me on this, listen through this entire episode because there’s a phenomenal story inside of here where Bob talks about giving a book to a client and just hinting that they’re gonna find the discovery that they need inside. And sure enough they did and just outstanding results as a result of that.

Another big topic we’re gonna talk about here, of course, is we talk about business at times is the whole understanding that it’s not just about putting your message out there, it’s about understanding the how and the why beneath all that. You do that as we talk about it here, if you can’t even sell it to yourself.

You’re gonna have a hard time selling it to others. And a bit of a preview. By the way, for those of you inside of the hypnotic business systems community, Bob shared a lot in terms of buying a list of leads, buying qualified list, and marketing directly to them. And Bob really is a master in direct marketing.

So sometime coming up. We’re gonna do a office hours feature with Bob, for those of you in the hypnotic business systems community, for a little bit more on that of buying lists. I’ll tell you right now, it’s something that I’ve done in the past and it was successful, and I will respectfully tell you now that Bob just reminded me of it, I’m kind of kicking myself going, Oh yeah, I need to do that again.

So, uh, side note, just a bit, bit of the subtext of this series or really everything else that I do, when you see me having a conversation with someone on this podcast. When you see me doing a guest training with someone, it’s not just because I think it’ll get clicks and downloads. There’s also the private intention that I go, There’s something that this person is doing that I wanna learn too.

And you know, we’ll just get another million downloads around the world from nice folks like you as well. So take some notes on this conversation in about 45 minutes time. We cover a lot, and I’d highly recommend head over to the show [email protected]. We’ll link over to Bob’s book on the magic of esop, as well as by the time this releases.

His other book on sleep improvement will likely be out as well. So either way, hit the show [email protected] to see how to connect with Bob, get access to his books, and learn even more while you’re there. Head over specifically to the website, jason webinar.com. This is a shortcut that we had made that brings you over to a free on-demand hypnosis business presentation, Six steps to a six figure hypnosis business.

Now, very often in sales and marketing, they would say that you should, as I would put it, know the difference between show and tell that in your marketing you should tell people what they ought to be doing. Yet. In order to learn how to do it, they have to buy your program. Sign up for your service to be shown how to actually make that work.

This presentation, six steps to a six figure hypnosis business is a bit different than most because in a matter of time now it’s about 45 minutes long. And that short span of time, step by step, I’m going to show you exactly six of the strategies. That in my businesses, we come back to time and time again to continue scaling up to bigger and better audiences.

So that’s a free on-demand workshop available right [email protected]. Head over there right away, get access, watch the entire thing. You’ll see exactly how to best take action with those six easy to implement steps. And with that, let’s jump directly into this week’s content pack session. Here we go.

This is episode number 300. In 22, Bob Martel on the Business of Business Hypnosis. I think you’re aware that I was in the Navy right outta high school, eight years on a submarine. . Uh, believe it or not, I was designated as the ship’s alcohol and drug counselor for some reason. But anyway, in the training they introduced hypnosis way back in the seventies, and I was able to use hypnosis to help some shipmates, uh, controller alcohol.

That was my first taste of using it as a tool to help people. And then, uh, post-military, I was working for. Motorola and I was teaching a course called Achieving Your Potential. I was licensed, it was by the Pacific Institute at the time, and I was teaching manufacturing people. The CEO believed that if people were happier, absenteeism would go down and all kinds of other benefits would happen on the, on the.

Work floor and hypnosis and self talk and positivity was all part of that program. And that was another taste. And then back in 2006, the New England Hypnosis Organization hired me to do some pr, and then I decided to get certified and started an office and haven’t looked back. And that was 2008 when I first launched my, my hypnosis practice.

Yeah, and I’d love to kind of rewind back a little bit, first of all, which coming out of the experience of, was there a specific story as to why you were flagged to be the go? This is the guy who could help people with drug and alcohol issues. I don’t know. Maybe the captain thought I was drinking less than everyone else, but serious.

Seriously, I had some unique responsibilities in the mission that we were. Underwater. The only thing I can say is we were observing four Navys while on training missions in the Western Pacific, and we occasionally got lost. Mm-hmm. , maybe I was just a responsible person and I started helping some shipmates and they were having some success and it worked out really well.

Yeah. Which that’s, that’s an interesting environment to talk about because this was this work actually on the submarines. Correct. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, let’s draw a correlation here that so often we’re working with a client. And here’s the environment that they’re in. If it’s, here’s the waiter, here’s the waitress, here’s even the bartender and the situation where someone’s basically stuck with what’s around them.

So just to kind of rewind back, what were some of the things that you were finding to be helpful with those people back then? I would c obviously there’s no alcohol to abuse, so you’ve got them in a better state of mind and you can talk about the situation. Uh, here, here’s a very real example. The captain of a, of a ship I at sea has full a.

And the captain of of the sub I was on actually handcuffed a crew member in the torpedo room, handcuffed him to torpedo, not that that was going through the torpedo tube, but he detained him at sea and said, you know, No more. No more of this. Yeah. And you know, I think that might have been the, the reason that I might have been asked to, to do the alcohol and, and drug rehabs, not rehab, but counseling through the Navy’s formal program.

Uh, I was trained in that area, but he saw me kind of talking with a guy and saying, you know, Cliff, how’s this working for you? , . And that, I guess that was the start of it. When you go way back to that time, Jason, Yeah. So then moving forward into the work with Motorola, we’re now, here was something, let’s say a little bit more group oriented.

If you can kind of rewind back and pull some of the techniques out of it, like what were some of the things you were helping to do there? Well, in a general Sense, program was designed to help employees and their families. Just feel good and, and feel happy in the moment because he believed then that happy employees resulted in happy customers.

And there’s a Harvard Review article way back from the late seventies, early eighties about you can’t have satisfied customers till you have happy customers, and you can’t have happy customers till you have satisfied employees. Nice. And you can’t have satisfied employees till you have happy employees.

So, as a result of the program, The manufacturing floor was more efficient and it improved profit margins and just productivity on the floor. Yeah. But some of the things we used were workshops on self-talk. That was probably this, this idea, one module was self-image psychology, and I was, uh, electronics technician and intelligence photographer.

What did I know about self image psych? But got licensed, got trained and taught the curriculum, and that was really the first seed, if you will, Jason, that got me focused on the power of self-talk and, and how we talk to ourselves every day as hypnotist in this profession and everybody we encounter. Yeah, Which, what’s interesting here is there’s this common thread, you know, having talked to so many people in this industry of I was already doing it, and then I found a way to learn how to do it on purpose.

Where you said they were hint, they were hints of hypnosis. Or at least as Richard non guard would say they were techniques that professional hypnotists would make use of that were inside of that. So kind of walk us through that timeframe leading up to like 2008 to then decide to get, let’s say, a little bit more formal of an education.

Well, when I started doing some PR and marketing work for a hypnosis organization, it brought back what I just described to you in between. I went off and had a great career in high tech sales and marketing and came back working for myself in marketing, working with that firm. And it just reconnected me with this idea that this is not anything new.

Let me, let me take it to the next step. And that’s when I got started really in earnest. Yeah. So then coming from the work in terms of let’s say corporate America, coming from the experience working in the Navy, as you got into hypnosis, was there a specific clientele that you were looking to work with?

Yes, indeed. Great question. I had several years of experience as a direct marketing copywriter and marketing consultant, primarily to small businesses, un under 10 million in sales, and I was using these techniques with them to. Move them in the direction that they agree they needed to go. And we started looking at obstacles.

And maybe I was using NLP and hypnosis without being formally trained in it. Who knows? But the end result was . I would use submarines as an analogy. Submarines are stealth. Yeah. We would use, we would use direct marketing to do stealth work. We would focus on our unique selling proposition and taking a deep dive into the benefits.

What’s the real value and your, is your pricing right? Does it match the perceived value? And what are the benefits of the benefits if that, if you can follow. Right, which you’re hitting right now on one of my favorite topics, which is not just that of business building, but this revelation that, and you’ve probably seen this too, that people in business often, you know, even in our industry, go, Yeah, I just need to pay for some Facebook or Google ads.

Well, I just need a new website, but none of that will have any value until they’ve actually done that intentional, deep dive into their own strategies. To understand, well, this is the value of what I do that, back to your example with Motorola. Happy, you know, staff equals happy clients, but if you can’t, as I would say, if you can’t sell the business to yourself, you are gonna have a hard time selling it to others.

That’s right. A long time ago, , before I, uh, entered the hypnosis profession back in 1992, I had a client, my first, very first marketing. Was from Tokyo and she sent me to a program that Jay Abraham did in 1992. Imagine a hotel room with 600 people that each paid $6,000 to be there for three days, , and it was amazing some of the techniques that came out of that that still applied to business today into personal life today.

And what he said was, Imagine buying stock in yourself. Step back and look at yourself as a company. Would you invest in you based on the way you’re behaving today? Nice. And what needs to change for you to become a stockholder in you, Inc. Yeah. Oh, I love that. Yeah. And that stayed with me. Yeah. So to look at it from that perspective, I mean that’s where the same as we sit down with a.

We’re elicit their outcomes or finding out what they’re moving towards. We’re finding out what their goals are and until we have that sort of target in terms of where we’re going, it’s a hard time getting them there. Is, is there any other stories that kind of stand out from the marketing experience?

The direct response of, you know, again, helping someone to realize what their specific positioning, their specific value. Oh, there are many. I’ve worked with people in just about every industry. One was that I’d like to talk about is manufacturing. Mm-hmm. , a plastics company, hired me to help him. Second generation president of the company, his father had just passed away, and here he is, the president of the company.

He doesn’t know what he’s doing. . He was scared, Which decisions should I make? Where am I going with the business? So we got that focused and I said, You know, in the conversation what came out of it is some new product development. And I helped him come up with one by having a free formed open minded mind mapping session up on a big whiteboard, if you can, can imagine that.

And in that process, we came up with evidence bags. Let’s start making evidence bags for law enforcement. and now his plant has quite a niche in that field. Mm-hmm. , he didn’t know how to do it. He was afraid to do it. I coaxed him and coached him , and helped him see the opportunity. Everyone catch that little adjustment there, by the way.

That was beautiful. Well, our, our, the old line about can you hypnotize someone to do something they normally wouldn’t do well when you think about it, they normally wouldn’t get up and speak in. They normally wouldn’t throw out their cigarettes and quit. So in essence, we are actually helping people to do something they normally wouldn’t do.

The ethical disclaimer is they’ve hired us to help them to do exactly that, so Right came on and you know it, it worked out fabulously. And in that same company, we came up with another little segment for him and that was printing on plastic little American flags. That, that you see people on Memorial Day putting on, uh, sticks and putting them in cemeteries and just, they might be on a table, but little plastic American flags, and that made everybody at the company feel good.

That dynamic was kind of interesting, but helping them open up their minds and their eyes so they can see things. That right at their feet. Yeah. To use some hypnotic language here to notice everything it is that they were not yet noticing. Correct. Yeah. And it’s, they would come in perhaps, I’m sure with the mindset of we need a better marketing strategy, but it had to be this more organic approach of looking at everything.

To see what can we do to create the right environment, the right community, and really move things forward, right? Right. And with this particular company, he was grieving the loss of his father, the founder of the company. At the same time, he’s trying to figure out how to run the company, and he had this confidence that he had some marketing and sales initiatives that he could believe in, and it gave him some comfort.

So all good. Yeah. So then what had to happen? I’m just curious to ask, in terms of getting things up and running, so here was the training, here was the education and now starting to market your own services out. What were some of those steps that you were putting in place to, to have people finding you and then eventually working with you?

As a hypnotist? Yeah. Well, that’s an excellent question. Would I rely on now? Well, actually in the beginning, I let everybody know that I was embarked in on this new adventure, but today I rely, I, I see people in the office. I have a, an office that’s very active. I have a big sign on the marquee out of the street.

I have modified how I present what I do. I’ve gone from sessions to packages to programs. Hmm. It’s, it’s, it’s much easier to talk about a program and what’s gonna happen within that program for someone and, and what’s gonna happen for that person after that program. Yeah. So let, let’s break that down because the difference between sessions versus either packages or programs.

Pretty clear sessions as we’re booking one at a time. How would you define the difference between programs versus packages? Someone might come in here for, well, let’s say weight loss, you know, what’s it gonna cost me, You know, and, and I’m, I’m trying to get a new model in place, but they’re sitting here at the desk with me and we’re talking about the program.

and once they understand the cost, it’s a number of sessions depending on their situation. Mm-hmm. , I’ve started switching that to a program at a fixed price and that they can see the whole thing clearly and it’s much easier for them to say yes. Yeah. Well the difference is now you’re presenting it as a solution versus this many sessions.

This completely, Yeah. A solution that has instant identity. For example, one audience that I enjoy working with is young adults who have been. Raised by helicopter parents that don’t know how to get started. They’re afraid of graduating from college, or they graduated a few years ago and they’re still in their parents’ basement playing video games.

So I came up with this program that I call North Star. . So by talking about it that way you can understand what it’s all about, and I haven’t told you anything about it yet, have I? Yeah, I love that . So I’m working on rolling out three or four of those programs to come back to your question, getting clients, I do direct marketing.

I’m a believer in direct mail and using good copy. And people in our profession should feel comfortable marketing themselves. Nothing to be afraid of. So I use a program called Every Door Direct Mail. Yeah. Plus I do sales letters. We’re in the middle of a campaign. My new assistant is becoming, or she just recently became a hypnotist.

She’s doing some direct marketing to dentists and a few other, uh, niches, and we’re using direct mail and a phone call. I love this because I know this is, I think the conversation that you and I had a whole bunch of years ago that I think we became friends on to go, all this stuff works. As I’ve said for years, all the stuff works.

You just have to do it. And for anyone who says direct mail is dead, I tell a quick story here. I was teaching, uh, training event. It was a business class for hypnotists. We’ll leave out where it was cuz that would immediately identify the audience, but take a guess. You’re right. I had people in the room going, Yeah, but email marketing doesn’t work.

To which I had to pause and go, You all signed up for this event from an email and just to drop the name, They all go, Yeah, but Igor Letta Hoki sends so many emails and I go, Okay, let’s pause for a second. Raise your hand if you’ve received Igor’s email. Put your hand down if you’ve bought from him. Every hand went down.

I go, so it works. . The issue is anything gets a bad rap. If it’s done badly, you know, here’s someone’s list that I got onto or, or anything. I signed up for two of three subscriptions to a company and I’m getting. This bement of emails for the number three. I’m like, I’ve already clicked that. I don’t want that one.

And there’s no way to back out of it, which that’s, uh, officially a spam issue as opposed to anecdotal spam issue. But to look at the messages that have to be there, we now know the value. We now have turned that into, I, I’d phrase that as proprietary process. What’s, what’s working for you in that every door direct mail approach?

What’s working is introducing myself, creating awareness, and giving them a reason to find me online. Say those points again. So they get every door, direct mail postcard. So there’s, there’s awareness of me. I have a few hot points. You don’t know who you’re gonna reach. Yeah. With every door, direct mail as opposed to buying a list and focusing.

So I have a few things I talk about sports performance that’s good for the adults or kids in the, in the household perhaps. I talk about smoking, I talk about sales, and I talk about stress and anxiety. Just brief. Yeah, I invite them to learn more. But a moment ago you gave us like this either three or four step system in terms of that, that you introduce yourself, what were the other steps in the direct mail piece?

No, in terms of I introduced myself. I, it was something in that lines. Well, I, I was talking about how I’m using direct mail to do that. Yeah. Direct mail is the introduction and I’m ultimately trying to create an online relationship with them so that they can receive emails, notices, those kinds of things.

So, So it begins with awareness and then you’re inviting them to take a next step, and then you’re further engaging with them, and then you’re asking ’em to take an action. That’s right. Basically your four step. Correct. Thank you for putting it in those terms. Sometimes we get so close to what we’re doing, we don’t see what we’re doing.

But what you’ve just highlighted there, Bob, is the system for everything. And that’s where, this has been my pitch for the last two years to go, here’s whatever new social media mechanism is out there, and here’s the one. 10 years from now we can’t even imagine, given our current data. And those four steps will work everywhere.

Introduction, engagement, invite action. That’s gonna be the formula everywhere. Yeah. Marshall McCluen said the medium is not the message. Yeah, it’s not. It’s the message, the value of the message, whether it’s a postcard or social. You gotta find out what works for you that fits your business plan and what you’re trying to achieve.

But somebody that wants to be virtual, the message that they might be using on social. Or other ways they can put it on a postcard. Did you know you can actually buy a list of smokers trying to quit? Yeah, so right from here in Massachusetts, I can work with a smoker in Cleveland once I buy his name and send him a postcard and, and tell him that I’m here online.

Which for those that don’t know, and you probably know better on this than I would, cuz you’ve done this more than I have, but basically there’s mechanisms, and this is part of the privacy conversation with social media. Why is it that Facebook is free and people get up in arms about the privacy policies, like, Well, you agreed to it when you signed up.

Is an element of that by using the free email with Gmail, you’re agreeing to specific terms of the provider and specifically the easy example is that if you wanted to get a mailing list of people interested in rock climbers, when you subscribe to the magazine about rock climbing, there were some bit of small print that was giving you, giving, asking your permission to also share what are, without not necessarily asking what exactly are the sources.

But from your perspective, how would you define how they got that list in the first place that we can get access to? I’d be glad to share maybe in the The post discussion. Yeah. Material that you provide. You’re gonna be one of the hot seats now in hypnotic business systems. So we’re gonna talk about this more there.

there are out there that sell data and they make a good living selling data because guess what? Direct marketing is not dead. That’s a self-limiting belief. And the sooner hypnotists let go of that, the wealthier they’re going to be. But a list broker compiles data. Uh, a list broker usually buys it from a company called Akm is one of them.

Yep. Uh, they’re probably the, the world’s largest and Facebook sells data to Axiom. So let’s say I went on to Facebook and typed in, stopped smoking. Well, that information now is part of my record. Those, those words, here’s a guy that’s searching for stopping smoking. He must be trying to quit. They can make that assumption maybe.

So they sell that data and then it gets compiled with other data from other sources and it builds an accurate profile of that person. Nice. And, but you can buy, let, let’s say you work with kids. If, if you like to work with children, you can buy data. For households in, uh, any zip code you want by lots of demographics and psychographics.

I wanna reach families that have this income level, have a house value of at least this, and they have 3.2 kids between these ages. This is hitting upon one of the ideas and just in terms of a category. That I think a lot of people are missing out on. And th this was my talk one time at, I think the last time I attended the NG conference was, this was part of the talk that I gave, that I used to get up and say, Here’s what I did my first year in hypnosis and I did all of this without paying for advertising.

And I said that, And I was wrong because I had put in hundreds, if not thousands of hours getting out there and doing business networking, getting out there and giving live talks and we can earn back money. We can’t necessarily earn back time. And the whole concept, I heard, um, the, the company advance your reach, talk about their definition of a dream audience.

A dream audience is when you have a group of people in front of you, either in person or virtual, and that dream audience is 80% plus your ideal prospects for your business. So it doesn’t matter that one time I talked to a group that was 150 people, that was actually not the audience at all for what I was looking to present.

So if we can have the ability to spend some money and get our message in front of the right people at the right time, It’s one of the best investments you can possibly do. I agree, and I think the focus should be solve one problem. Yeah. Every hypnotist ought to review their client notes and understand a theme to the, the kind of work they like to do and solve one problem.

Which I know one of the problems that you work with quite a bit, and this is part of your background, so it’s a natural sort of through line to this of doing hypnosis for people that are also business clients. Could you talk about that for a bit? Absolutely. It’s a great way for me to combine. I used to struggle with it internally, like I had my feet on two lily pads.

Yeah, OSIS and marketing. So now I’m on one Lilly Pad , and it feels grace. But I am working with business clients. And sometimes I might use, you know, non-business front end offers to, to get them into the, the loop, so to speak. But I’m helping them solve the pressing issue. And then other things expand. Like when I first started my mar marketing consulting business, I helped people fix their yellow page ad and then people would say, What else do you do?

Yeah. I’d say, Well, let’s do some direct marketing to your top customers and can sell more to them, and so on and on. But, so I’m working. Just completed working with a, a guy that owns a residential painting company, and he had a lot of things in his way that hypnotists will recognize. He had obstacles, he couldn’t delegate.

He wasn’t charging enough, so we, we got through the obstacles that allowed him to raise his prices. He raised his prices. He couldn’t afford to do his own market or do more marketing. He got better clientele, perceived value. He got to do lettering on his truck. Here’s another great example. I had a, a gentleman come in here.

This is a great example, Jason, of how a client comes into your hypnosis world for help representing or presenting one issue, but it changes when they come here. Mm, this guy came to me with anxiety about starting his business. He was wanting to make a change and he didn’t have that courage and confidence, so we focused on that and he sat up in, in the chair when we were doing some work together, and he said, Bob, I know exactly what I need to go do.

And I said, What’s that, Eric? He said, I need to go home and start being a better dad to my son. I have to stop waiting for my father who’s up the street in a hospital and he won’t be coming out to start being a dad to me. So he had this thing in the back of his mind that was blocking him, and now this was two years ago.

We’ve had a few sessions, but he now has a $2 million residential roofing and siding business. His son at home who was 22 using drugs, unemployed, playing video games, no relationship with his father. His son is now the vice president of sales driving a big, beautiful truck with lettering on it, and it’s just a great story.

Yeah. One more story. You know, you, you’ve talked about the imposter syndrome. Mm-hmm. had a gentleman come to me. He was a chief marketing officer of a 300 employee. This is another great story. We resolved that he also confessed that he had a fear of flying, and we resolved that, and then he was approached by the CEO and his wife, who was a privately held company, and they said, You know, Mark, we love what we see in you lately.

We’d like to groom you to be the next ceo. So you see how this stuff unlocks future opportunity. There’s a beautiful thing inside of that, which, You know, I even to call out the main segment where I spend most of my time in business is that I, I, I change the entry point for my clients. My clients are coming in through a program which is teaching hypnotic languaging to entrepreneurs, you know, coaches, consultants, and it’s the people inside of that that are then reaching out for the one to one help.

So inside of everything, yes, we need to work on the the what and the how, but also the why and the emotions beneath it. And I love particularly the story of the experience that here’s the guy who came in for business and realized, here’s the other things I need to do. Right. I would even say better.

Here’s the things I need to do right to fix the relationship with my son. You know, where we have that person whereby accident, you know, they came in for a confidence issue and they also dropped a lot of weight. They also changed their habits. They got better in line. The whole mindset that the way you are in one place is the way ever, ever else.

The, the Bobby set me up for the perfect transition. That’s what we do. Well, speaking of stories, I think we need to chat about Asop. We’d love to, but I see how he did that. . I love it. Asop was a great storyteller, but I wanna just mention this first. Yeah. And I used stories in every client session, but you made a point that I think everyone listening, myself included, need to keep in mind what is the entry point?

Mm-hmm. for accessing your programs as a professional hyp. And I, I think that it’s a profound question if I don’t mind saying so. No, it, it’s, it’s, I think it’s the, it’s the most important question. I think we, we, we were chatting for a bit just catching up before we hit record, but I was sharing that one of the biggest changes in terms of what I do over the last couple of years, and this is something I teach in the velvet rope strategy that of onboard.

That it’s not just that people are filling out an application to schedule time to talk. It’s what we do with that person between the time of the inquiry and the actual phone call. If anyone wants the business model, here’s the, Here it is in one sentence, let me send you a video to check out, which will answer most of the questions you have, plus the ones you haven’t yet thought to ask.

That sentence, , but changing that entry into something changes everything it does, and it’s got my mind clicking away as we have this conversation. Yeah. So while that’s brewing in the background, and you corrected me on the pronunciation, so thank you for that esop, There was a fascination that you had, which we’ll talk about the book here in a bit, I’m sure.

But for, for those that need an introduction just to the whole category, could you, could you share what we should know first of all, in terms of who ESOP was? What the story stand for? Well, we all, most of us are familiar with ESOP’s fables, which we believe are children’s stories. And they morphed into children’s stories primarily by, uh, writers and storytellers and good old Jolly England in the 17th, 18th century.

ESOP lived 600 years before Christ and ESOP was a slave, and ESOP told stories to help his own. Cause in life, and he ultimately used fables to win his freedom. And I’m shortening the story here for, for our, our conversation now. But ultimately, the people of Delphi didn’t like ESOP because he was smarter than all of them, and they threw him over a cliff, and that was the end of esop.

But ESOP lives his stories, you know, we all know the, the tortoise and the hair and mm-hmm. , some of the others and the moral that we extract from that. But the beauty of a fable is it’s short. , it’s attention getting and it has a message that might resonate without putting it in your face. You take the message from it.

Yeah. My motivation for writing the book is I’m always given books to clients. I, I, and as you know, Jason, I, I give away your book to my client and it helps me get business. So thank you Rob. I just in, in the process of moving, we will have amassed more addresses in the course of one year than I’ve had in most of my life.

And I just went through my Amazon and it’s okay. We need to delete the office address from the shipping. We need to delete, we need to delete the home address. There was a temporary rental in Springfield while we were selling our home, so now deleted that address. So Bob, as of right now, you’re one of the only two addresses still in my Amazon account for that reason.

So thank you. Great. So again, again, thank you for writing that book because I profit from that experience. Thank you, . But back to esop, The magic of esop, which is the name of the. The motivation was this. I had a woman come in here, marketing executive. So here’s an example of a business person coming in, but needing help.

She wasn’t heavy, but she wanted to end her sugar addiction. Mm-hmm. , and boy was she being stubborn about it. It was a part of her that wouldn’t let it go. She was drinking 12 cans of Coca-Cola every day. Every day. So at the end of the third session, I handed her a book called ESOPs. Fables. Mm-hmm.

Children’s illustration of, you know, top 20 or something. I said, I want you to take this home and just read them. I said, One of them. Will resonate with your subconscious mind and you will instantly let go of sugar. I said, I don’t know which story will relate to you. I love this , right? I said, I don’t know, and you don’t even have to tell me.

Yeah, which one? Cuz you might not know yourself, but your mind is gonna take from one of those fables that you read to yourself, the message that it needs to have success with this. And bingo, she calls me up, she goes, It worked. And I said, I know . And so that was the motivation for writing the book. I, I wanted to teach other professionals, people in, in our profession, school teachers, coaches.

Parents how to craft and use. I call it speaking utopian. Nice. You know, being able to use fables, isn’t it? Isn’t it nice to be able to bring the giants into your client sessions? Because, you know, we stand on the shoulders of giants, you know, Well, even to quote Karen Hans phrase on this, that we don’t have to be the wizard.

And the beauty of, you know, I call it the indirect writing defense suggestion as to the moment of going in. Perhaps you’ve already figured out exactly why I had you read that story, though other parts of your mind have already figured out exactly why. Right. And it’s where we’re not directly saying, You know, I learned metaphor at one point by going, Don’t make it too linear.

Okay, Now the story of the alligator, that was actually you. No, don’t do that. reminds me of an alligator who is trying to quit smoking. Idiot. I know you’re talking about me. So in the book, I talk about hacking the fables. Yeah. To make them suit your client. Don’t make me google fable hacking.com and see if that’s available.

Well, you might have to go back and read my book again, Jason. I know. Yeah, I did. It’s been a while. Yeah, I know. Yeah. So looking at these stories, I love this idea of looking at a bank, which the beauty of this is tortoise in the hair, the mouse. I, I think there’s a podcast episode. I’ll leave out who, It was good guessing where I opened by reading the story of the, The line with the tho is paw.

Ah, and these are universal. Well, my editors were, We can’t believe you’re having this person on your podcast. And I go listen to the intro, and they go, That was great, but the opportunity to use this universal story. Which part? One, Let’s get hypnotic here. There’s already a bit of a bypassing of that critical faculty.

The best forward hypnotic induction. Thank you, James Hazelrigg, Once upon a time. The ultimate one word, hypnotic induction. Imagine. So the opportunity that you bring someone in by way of a story, that chances are most people know these, and it kind of peaks up that curiosity. It brings up that awareness.

And now here’s the way it applies to them is, is there a story that stands out of, other than the one you just shared, of integrating these stories, integrating these ones with your. Well, let’s stick with the tortoise in the hair for a minute. Okay? Yeah. Ikea in, in the uk. Ikea launched a tortoise in the hair commercial and illustrated the hair.

You know, the, the night before the race, the, the hair is out, running around, having a party, playing pool, staying out late, and the tortoise went to bed early, got a good night’s rest, and woke up already for the race. So he was taking his, his mission seriously. And that commercial that, uh, that campaign was great for ikea.

They, they won all kinds of awards, but there’s an example of hacking in the office. I’ve used that for people who are struggling to make progress towards their goal. Yeah. So I’d be curious, before we start to wrap things up here in a bit, as we’re coming up on time, we know some of the quote greatest hits.

Is there a bit of a, let’s say a b. Of ESOP that most people would not know that you think most of our listeners should be aware of about esop. The, the story one. One of his fables, one of his fables, boy, one of my favorites is the north wind and the sun, and it’s a fable about the north wind bragging, uh, he see it’s cold and he, he sees a man with a coat and he says to the son, essentially they place a bet and he says to the son, I can make that man across the street, take off his.

And the more he blew wind towards him, the cold north wind just made him keep the coat on. He became more determined and then the sun said, Let me have a try. And the sun turned up the temperature and the guy took off his coat. So sometimes we try too hard to get what we’re trying to accomplish. And you know, when we do that, like whether it’s helping someone stop smoking or help someone do anything else, If they’re trying too hard, they might be chasing it away, and perhaps everybody has figured out exactly why Bob has told this story today, especially on an episode titled The Business of Business Hypnosis

Nicely done. Where can people find out more from you? How can they get in touch with you? Well, the best place is to go to bob martel.com or you can send an email to me, Bob at Bob Martel, or go to my official practice website, uh, positive results hypnosis.com, which is being rebranded to focus on the the program approach that I’ve mentioned to you earlier.

Excellent. And I’m sure the book’s on Amazon, and we’re gonna link to it in the show notes, but give us the title one more time so folks can find it faster. The title is The Magic of esop and you’ll probably be seeing another book right beside it called I Am Sleeping Now, My new book, which would be out in April of 2021.

Awesome. Perfect timing for this to come out toward the end of the month in April, and this has been fantastic. I know we’ve been chatting for years and it’s about time. It took us 321 episodes to rev up to this one and get it right, Bob. So perfect time, . Well, thank you very much. I appreciate the conversation.

Yeah. Any final thoughts for the listeners out. Well, , if there’s a final thought, if you’re working with business people, traditional coaching takes them so far. Maybe they’ve had a coach or consultant working with them, but they’re not making progress. Hypnosis remember adds that X factor of success. So they get breakthroughs in the progress that they’re trying to move towards.

So think about yourself as a, as a catalyst for change and progress that they’re not realizing. Now I, that’s what I would say. Jason, Lynette here once again, and as always, thank you so much for interacting in the free public. Work Smart hypnosis community. We’ll link to that in the show notes [email protected].

We’ve got more than a thousand members from all around the world keeping a daily conversation going, advancing this profession of professional hypnotists. While you’re there too, I’ll make this easy go by Bob’s books. Really, they’re, they’re that good. Uh, go get his books phenomenal content from a guy who clearly is a worker, clearly is a thinker, and really ought to be a much bigger voice in this industry.

I learn something every time I talk to Bob, so connect with him. Check out his books. We’ll link to them in the show notes. And once again, check out jason webinar.com and that’ll bring you over to a signup page to get instant on demand access to that free presentation. Six steps to a six figure hypnosis business.

As we like to say, inside of hypnotic business systems, guessing sucks. Here’s what’s actually working right now. Ain’t nobody got time for pipe dreams. In theory. Here is the actual work of things that not only have I made work in my business, but thousands of other practitioners all around the world. As Bob says, his phrasing around as I would say that it’s not the platform, it’s the strategy.

It’s not the magic of the medium. There we go. It’s instead what you do with it. So follow these six steps. And get even more once you see Hal headed over there to jason webinar.com. See you soon. Thanks for listening to the Work Smart Hypnosis Podcast and work smart hypnosis.com.