Session #461: Scott Sandland on the Practice of Presence

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And when I’m hyper confident in where we need to go and a protocol’s working perfectly and I know we’re on session three of a three session protocol, I say to my client, you’re saying everything. I’m expecting. That means I’m going to take a couple minutes to just circle back and double check everything so I don’t get arrogant and miss anything and make sure I’m really understanding you and not just running you through a protocol.

Hypnosis helps people take back control of their lives. But here’s the thing. Too many hypnotists struggle to get consistent results with their clients or grow their hypnosis businesses. I’m Jason Linett, and after more than two decades of building a thriving hypnosis practice, I created this podcast to help you do the same. Whether you’re just starting your hypnosis journey or if you’re ready to scale your business to the next level, you’re exactly where you need to be. Welcome to Work Smart Hypnosis. This is a conversation that’s going to help you to focus on what actually matters. Hey, it’s Jason. And we’re about to dive into a phenomenal conversation that I had with Scott Sandland as part of a recent event that I did that I’m now sharing with all of you. And the topic of it was the practice of presence.

And you’re going to hear some incredible insights diving into the strategies of how we work interactively within our clients, how we sort of balance the difference between following the specific techniques that we’ve learned as hypnotist and hypnotherapist, as well as modifying in real time to the client who’s in front of us. Plus, lean in, particularly when you hear us speak about something that Scott calls the expectation to ritual ratio. This is one of the cleanest and most direct ways I’ve ever heard anybody in our industry talk about the difference in terms of our sessions, let’s say when we’re first beginning the work, and then what happens over time, as we build up more authority, we build up more confidence within our skills, as well as just building up greater comfort in the work that we’re doing.

In addition to that pause, that silence was intentional because, yes, we’re also going to talk about the power of silence, not only what it can do for you in your sessions, but also how to intentionally earn those moments as well as appropriately utilize them as well. So this session, this episode is number 461 in our podcast series. If you head over to worksmarthypnosis.com 461 that’ll link you over to the show notes, the details of this episode as well as the additional links, some of which I’ll reference briefly here. One of them, of course, is htlive.net that’s the details for the upcoming HypnoThoughts Live conference that’s happening this summer in Las Vegas.

All the details registration [email protected] and then you can also check out htlive365htlive365.com that is the project that I partnered along with Scott and Stephanie to roll out about two and a half years ago at this point. It features ongoing updates, access to live real time summit events, plus the replays, some incredible AI tools. You can find all the details at he live365.com though a little bit of a timestamp here would be the fact that this conversation you’re about to listen to was recorded at the end of 20 and in the conversation you hear Scott and I talk about the pricing being $24. It’s different now because we’re several years later, but check out all the details. It’s still a ridiculously great invitation and generous offer. Find all the [email protected] and hey, with that, let’s dive directly in. This is session number 461.

Scott Sandland on the practice of Presence.

It’s good to be here. Hi Jason.

Hey there. And for those that don’t know you and what you’re up to, could you share just a quick introduction?

I’m a janitor. Hey everybody, I’m Scott Sandland. I’m the founder of a thing called hypnothoughts.com and now a thing called hypnothoughts live pretty darn Large Hypnosis Conference where Jason has been a presenter and supporter for many years and many of you have been attendees. So you know who I am. But rewinding, I’m a clinician. I spent 25 years seeing clients, mostly clinical settings and clinical referrals, and I’m really excited to share some insights which.

The idea of presence that one of the things I’ve appreciated about the work that I’ve seen you do over the years is it’s not necessarily, hey, here’s this specific technique, here’s this specific method, here’s your spin on this classic technique. It’s instead about recognizing what all is going on inside of the process and then creating that environment where facilitating that change now becomes Easy. So the topic at hand is that of presence. And I’m just curious to see what you have to say on that.

Sure. The important topic that gets under discussed in our profession and a sentence that I’ve been saying for a little while is if your success is based on techniques, your success is limited by techniques. And that’s a stage of your career and it’s a reasonable stage and it’s a good stage and I don’t know how long it should last, but there’s a stage where you are very techniquey. We I was or one is very technique Y. And that tends to be the spot where people get stuck on that treadmill of I need one more workshop, I need one more course and then I’ll be ready. And that is the idea that the power of the change work is in if you did a six step reframe correctly versus if you are sitting with a client who is ready to create change.

If you are sitting with a highly motivated individual who wants issue X to be different than it is right now. And you have spent enough time doing this work with clients and in classes and all those things, but you really have synthesized this information. This, I think this makes a lot of sense where you can be present with this person, you can sit with them, you can listen and genuinely audience them. And I’m sure we’re going to come back and really kind of pull the thread on that a lot. But genuinely audiencing rather than sitting there listening to a person saying, okay, which technique does this fit? And every time they say stuff, you’re throwing it at another technique and you go, no parts is wrong. Okay, now what? Okay, regression’s wrong. Now what?

And you’re sitting there listening to the person just deciding yes or no on techniques instead of sitting with a person and hearing their story. And that moment allows you to shift what the magic is in hypnotherapy and in your office. And one of the reasons I love being so present and patient with my clients, and again, that’s another thread to pull, is because when I am patient and present with my clients, the change really is theirs. And what I can do as a practitioner is build them up instead of build hypnosis up. And if I can say no, I’m just here to build you up. The magic’s inside you. We’re just going to make sure. And by the way, Jason, I’m going to do it. The Schwartz. I saw your picture from Facebook. I’m there with you. It’s the Schwartz. The Schwartz.

The power Was in you all along. The ring is from a cracker jack box. And if you can get your clients to believe that, if you can have that moment with your clients where you’re like, yeah, the techniques. I know all those. I’m the hypnotist. Let’s be here with you. That is such a disarming moment for them. It is such a real moment for them. And if you are interrupting them with, okay, I know a technique to do. Shut up, let’s get to work. You’ve shut them down from giving you great stuff that allows you to help them way more. So that’s kind of high level. And then we can jump into pieces that are interesting to you.

Yeah. Which we’ve already given the first hint towards Mel brooks’s spaceballs, which is the movie poster on the floor right over there. Because of course it is. And then, just a warning, he and Scott and I will try to resist going off the deep end with references, which of course means now we need to talk about waiting for guffman, the christopher guest movie. The guy who did the movie spinal tap and best in show, there was one called for guffman, which proves the fact that you need extremely skilled actors to play bad actors. Yet you already know where I’m going with this. There’s a specific scene where they’re putting on a musical and the musical director says to these actors, okay, so eventually you’re going to learn the song so well that it’s going to be as if you never learned it.

You’ve just always known it. You’re going to forget that you’ve learned it. So let’s just skip the learning phase and let’s just start the song. And he starts playing the piano and no one starts singing.

Right? Right.

And now we’ll mention that it’s Catherine o’, hara, Eugene levy, and like top comedy people in this moment. So I agree with you. And how do we start to turn that into something tangible that people can begin to do?

So here’s a simple example of things I see other practitioners do and I hear instructors talk about. They think about the minutes on the clock wrong in their practice. They think about how they can save time in certain areas and shave time off. How quick is your pre talk? How fast is your induction? Are you doing a rapid induction? I’m from a generation of hypnotists that all our trainings. There was a couple year window where every one of our trainings, people were pushing rapid inductions really aggressively. I like them. But there was this window of time. Where everyone I trained with was saying, if you’re not doing rapid inductions, you’re doing your client a disservice because you’re wasting time that you could be generating change work and you need to be getting them into somnambulism inside of a minute and a half.

Otherwise you’re a crappy practitioner. Shut up. No, like, let’s just push way hard back on any of that. If you’re telling me that you need to optimize a minute in and a half in your practice, in your 55 minute clinical hour, if you out of your 55 minutes, this minute and a half, we need to save, that means you’re wasting time. Other places that the idea that like that is an urgent thing means you’re not really understanding what’s going on in the session. And the session isn’t about the ritual and the process. The session is about what the person gets out of it. Right. Like basic nlp. The meaning of communication is the response that you get. And you want to make sure that client is going on that journey, not you’re doing a good technique, whatever. And so how to make this practical?

Let’s just take a minute and audit all the things we audit. Let’s just say, okay, what really does matter? And make sure we make the important things. Because the most important thing is the client’s belief that this is happened, happening or going to work, you know, moving backwards. And whatever we’re doing, whether that be, you know, email systems that are saying, hey, your appointments in two days, you know, the confirmation emails that help build that expectation and remind them of that, great.

If that’s, you know, having testimonials on your website, if that’s having cool stuff in your office, if it’s having a half overflowing trash can with cigarettes from donated clients, whatever you’re doing to build up that expectation, we should be talking about those things and not which technique we need to better at listening to them and really listening to listen, not listening to talk.

Which here’s the. Yeah, but to that, and I’m curious to hear your take. I don’t think we’ve ever had this specific chat before. So there’s a level of confidence, let’s use that very intentional phrase first. There’s a level of confidence that comes. Someone’s gone through a training and they are told this is the best method.

Right.

I was mentioning earlier that the window of time, you know, right before the.

As fast as possible.

It’s just this short. We’re not seeing as much. There’s still some of the absolutism of. This is the one true model. If you’re not using this method, that won’t work. Which. It’s a marketing angle and. But the.

Here’s the.

Yeah, but. Which is that it creates a level of confidence that the practitioner goes into the work believing they’ve got the best methods. And the little caveat of that is it serves a benefit to get them out there sooner. There then comes some specific age of reason. And then they realized that these methods worked until they didn’t, and they now need greater flexibility. So it creates a level of confidence. Like, what’s that balance? And what’s the. What up with that?

Yeah, yeah. It’s a really valid point. So early in your career, being based on technique makes good sense because it does give you that confidence. It is. It’s Fisher Price, my first hypnosis practice, and it’s round plastic corners and the knives are made of plastic. And it’s. It is super duper simple. Like, you can have high confidence that these techniques have worked for a long time for a lot of people. And I’m a people, so I can make these techniques work. That is a great place to start, except for that as you get better, you start developing your own style. And as you start developing your own style, you necessarily kind of move away from a certain set of techniques as you move towards another. And versatility is about being able to do as much as possible. Yes.

But there are certain techniques that don’t fit congruently within your practice or with your clientele. And I can say I. I remember very vividly having clients and, you know, being okay. I was. I don’t know, it’s probably like 10 clients a week. I was doing fine and I was getting there. And then I went to the next training and I came back, and all 10 clients I saw that week. I tried to use techniques from the last weekend instead of the stuff that I had been doing for the last year or whatever. And what I was doing in my practice and what I was doing with my clients changed because now I was like, oh, I just learned these techniques.

I got to get these into my office because these are the things that I’ve been waiting for, and these are the things that are going to make a difference. And again, that’s externalizing the power. As soon as I’m externalizing the power outside of me and outside of the client, we’ve got an issue. I want to make sure we’re internalizing all of this into the client. And I want to just make sure we’re sitting there with that. Because two things happen when you do the thing that I just said that’s wrong. I mean, yes. You get the confidence to get out the door and get started and get those reps. Great. Know that if you’re doing that, you’re not going to have a hundred percent success rate. You’re not supposed to. Nothing has a hundred percent success rate. Some of you heard me say this.

Death does not have a hundred percent success rate. People have died and been brought back to life. So if you think you need to better at killing people than death, like, it’s just, it’s crazy. We just need to be good enough. And so when you get started. Yeah. You’re going to have some clients that don’t get great results. That’s okay. Like, don’t let those trainers that say, if you don’t have a hundred percent success rate, I have a hundred. Like, shut up. Like, nuh. So if we just say with these clients, practice listening. And I see practitioners interrupt their clients right when the client’s about to tell them something that is game changing. Just, there it is. And the person is so excited to do their technique. I genuinely, I ask my clients, I did this yesterday. I see a couple clients still.

I said, are you ready to do the hypnosis? And this is like our third session. Are you ready? Yeah, I’m ready. Okay. Is there anything else? Nope, I’m ready. Great. I’m going to ask you that question two more times before we do any hypnosis. And they go, why? I go, cause people forget. And then halfway to the hypnosis they say, oh, I wish I had told him this. So I just ask you three times. And then sometimes nothing comes out and sometimes something does. And they like that because that means I’m paying attention. And when I’m hyper confident in where we need to go and a protocol is working perfectly and I know we’re on session three of a three session protocol. I say to my client, you’re saying everything.

I’m expecting that means I’m going to take a couple minutes to just circle back and double check everything so I don’t get arrogant and miss anything and make sure I’m really understanding you and not just running you through a protocol. And they go, oh, that’s great. Thank you. And then we look for little things. Pro tip. Those little things that they’ve gotten really comfortable sharing are now the next issues you get to work on. With that client. So instead of being like, they stopped smoking. I never saw them again. Success as usual. High five. Everybody turns into a client that you see 10 times, and they’re happy all 10 times, and you’re making their life better. 10 Times.

And that means they have 10 sessions to go home and tell their neighbor, oh, my gosh, I just went and saw Brenda Gray and she helped me so much. And it’s 10 times the amount of referral opportunity, because people love feeling heard. And you have the opportunity to do that for them, and they want that.

Well, you mentioned something earlier, that expectation to ritual, which is like, where are they within that spectrum? And it’s this awareness where really what I’m getting at is the idea is phenomenal. Be present. Listen, let’s look for. What are some of those tactical things we can do that actually get us into that mode, though. You talked about, you know, expectation, and there’s a ratio that you talk about of expectation compared to ritual.

Yeah, I’ll jump into that. So the expectation to ritual ratio is an inversely proportional thing, which is the more expectation a client has, the less you have to do the. The less expectation the client has, the more you have to dress things up. The nice thing just to use it about a rapid induction is it’s so flashy, it. Even if you do a subtle one, it’s still so dramatic. It creates high expectation. Having a bunch of testimonials builds expectation, and that makes your work easier. And if you understand where a client is in that expectation to ritual ratio and you understand that their expectation is high, you can be really relaxed and just be fluid. If their expectation is still low and you need to build that again, patience, the ability to ask great questions is really important in hypnotherapy.

Here’s a very specific example. Pattern recognition is a really easy thing for us. And we start seeing clients that have the same issues, you know, or patterns within those issues. You know, lazy example, stop smoking. You’re going to ask about cigarettes after meals, first cigarette in the morning, cigarette breaks at work. What are their triggers? And if you just say, hey, what are your triggers? What are the tough cigarettes? They’re going to tell you, first cigarette in the morning, last cigarette before bed, after a meal, with a cup of coffee, at work, whatever their things are. But those of you who see stop smoking clients, those five are five of the top seven or 10. And so you can just ask about those things and you’re not suggesting them. You can say, so what’s going on with you?

Know which cigarettes are going to be the toughest for you? Which cigarettes are you looking forward to get rid of the most? What’s first thing in the morning look like for you? What’s with a cup of coffee look like for you? And they go, oh. You’re asking about things that do match my reality. So you’re asking a question that allows me to say, yes, that one, yes, that one, no, that one. And no matter what their response is, you say, perfect, great, perfect, great. And you’re getting that feedback from them, but you’re sitting there spending time listening to how they do it. You know all those NLP techniques where you’re like, teach me how to be this way. Teach me how to do this thing. You can do that in a less formulaic way just by shutting the hell up. Simple technique.

One of my favorite techniques that I teach clients with teenagers is also a great technique for you. When your client is telling you what’s going on, take a very small sip of liquid water, tea, whatever you have with you. And then before you swallow that sip, don’t just hold water in your mouth. Not a ton, Nothing weird. A small sip just so you can’t interrupt them as a reflex. It gives you just that moment that you have to think to interrupt them. And so if you just hold water in your mouth, just a sip of water, that’s all you need to do to make interrupting your client a little bit harder and being present a whole lot easier.

I love that. For the reason of I love it in the chat. Super great idea. Yeah. Just creating that environment where, like, what are those shortcuts? What are those easy ways to get into this? Which is not to go, hey, here’s how we trick it, but really, here’s how we just get better at that specific skill. You know, it’s where before I go into the. Oh, let me tell you my story about that. Before I go into the, Let me tell you about this other client. It’s that so often being comfortable just with silence. And it’s often where you ask the question and they answer it. And if you then hold back from jumping in and being really smart, that’s where they then start to give you all the extra detail. You know, something that back to.

We talked about pacing and leading at the early part of the day in terms of. Again, this is the foundation of everything. Simply taking something that they said and just repeating it. And like, this is something that I’ve tried to screw up in really smart ways and then learned don’t. Which is don’t take the statement they said and then repeat it back as the question. No, just. I just say it and then just let them sit with that. And that’s when you start to get the more specific details as to. Well, yeah, but here’s this one situation where I really like, all of a sudden, there’s the most valuable stuff. It’s about creating that space. Okay, so Scott Sandlin’s telling everybody to drink water but not swallow it. What are some other strategies?

I am telling you to do that. Here’s another one. My clinical hour is broken into three 20 minute segments. Ish. So I have my sort of my pre talk and chit chat and hey, how’s it going since last time? Or let me tell you about hypnosis. You know, that kind of first window and then I have my hypnotizing the person and then I have stuff that happens after the hypnosis. Now, those aren’t three 20 minute equal parts. That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is in my office, I have a thing in my office. It’s a screensaver that changes every 20 minutes. So I have a 20 minute. I don’t have to look at clocks. And it’s the top of the hour, 20 minutes and 40 minutes. And it’s been that way for 11 years.

And it’s random pictures of whatever, you know, it’s just landscape photography that’s invisible to everybody else. But to me, when a picture changes, that lets me go, okay, it’s been 20 minutes. Okay, it’s been 20 more minutes. So during the intake, as we’re talking, we just sit there chatting and I see the thing change. I don’t need to look at a clock. I don’t need to look at anything. I don’t have notes in front of me. I’m right here. I’m sitting like this, looking right at my client. Just. I’m not looking at anything else. And that thing flips and I go, okay, that’s been 20 minutes. And they’re still talking about their intake stuff. I got some time to kill. I’m okay. But then if it flips again and they’re not hypnotized yet. All right, we’re doing a lot of intake today.

We better be switching to some NLP eyes open stuff if I haven’t done that yet or find out why this is taking longer, or put the clock. No, Brenda, here’s why I don’t want to do that, Brenda, because if you’re thinking of minutes, then I’m looking every five minutes. What time is it? What time is it? I don’t want to know what time it is. I just want a reminder. Hey, it’s been 20 minutes. And you’re like, got it. Thanks. That’s all I need. Hey, it’s been 40 minutes. Great. That’s all I need. It just gives me that one moment that I don’t have to glance, I don’t have to look, I don’t have to do anything. I used to look at my clients watches. I don’t do that anymore because Apple watches made that harder. Yeah. And phones.

So it doesn’t work as much as it used to. So that’s why I switched to this other method. But I don’t want to keep track of time in minutes. I want to just break my session into big moments so I can say, okay, this is the moment I need in the first third. This is the moment I need in the second third. And this is the moment I need in the final third. I just need connection. And I in the first third, I need connection. I need them to feel trust in me specific to this issue, if that makes sense. So I need to tell them a story of a client who’s already gotten better with this, or I need to somehow like, demonstrate that I’m the guy. I’m the guy for this job. You’ve come to the right place.

I’m not stressed or worried. I’m present in listening. That’s what I want in that first 20 minutes. That second 20 minutes is all about them being ready and making sure they’re ready to make change. I don’t care if their eyes are open or not in that 20 minutes. I just need to make sure they’re ready. Obviously, as soon as they’re ready, you want to get their eyes closed. Ish. But you’re not rushing. But that’s that 20 minutes. And then the third 20 minutes is I want to make sure we’re doing change work, whatever that means. And as if I’m hitting those three things in those 20 minutes, then everything else is more relaxed. And I’m not worried about 90 seconds of a rapid induction versus a progressive muscle relaxation.

It gives me the ability to say, no, we got all the time in the world. And from a mindset perspective, there’s no second hand, there’s no minute hand. There’s a 20 minute hand. And then I can just lean back and say, no, take your time. What else? And it creates a vibe. It just creates this atmosphere of they’re taken Care of. We’re not going to get rattled in here. And that environment allows them to feel like, oh, I’m telling this guy all this really intimidating crap. And he’s not scared, he’s not shaken, he’s not nervous. And his follow up questions sound like he’s seen this before. This is the person who can help me. And that’s that. 20 Minutes right there.

Couple of quick things here. Which one for the recording. In the chat, Paul Ramsey said, it scares me how smart he is sometimes. I just want to make sure we had that captured on the recording. So I’ll keep going here. No, and I point out that really theme of this is it may be those specific things. Yet let’s kind of go to that bigger picture perspective of this. What is it that we can do to remove away the distractions? What are the things we can do that pull away the. It has to be this one specific way. I think like one of my favorite things is like sometimes the game of oh, I heard this one hypnotist say this one specific thing. And I went, oh, that’s good. John Sorbonne One time I heard him go, oh, good, you’re already there.

I went, gotta be one of the best inductions. I love that it’s faster than his other ones. Looking at from the angle of here’s just what can we do to peel away those things that would stand between us versus actually being there and going to what were doing right before you came on of what is it that’s within their language? You know, in marketing terms it’s referred to as burying the lead. That the most important thing just came to the surface. Here’s the thing that I just asked you the question of if this is a. Yeah, but which is sometimes the clients do just speak in code. You know, they say if I could just find that part of me that’s not confident and just dial it up, that would help me out. And then you go, I have a thing for that.

Yeah, but okay, so perfectly that. So when the client says that, like they tee you up perfectly, you write down in your notes, dial it up, and now you’re done. You know everything you need to know. You don’t need to know anything else. You know the technique you want to use with this client right now. Great. Now double check and triple check because you have enough time. You have the time. The picture hasn’t changed. It’s only been 17 minutes. You don’t know that. You just know that the screensaver hasn’t changed. And now I Have the right answer. I’ve got three minutes to build relationship and double check and find cool little things that I can then put into this session that makes it even more custom. So I’m like, oh, I got that thing.

That doesn’t mean I need to rush to the next stage of this. It means I still have all this time to double check, triple check, or find other things. And I see hypnotist. Hear that Dial up. You’re like, oh, quick, we gotta go. I know exactly what this is. I gotta dial. Okay, here we go. Close your eyes. Imagine a big volume knob.

Turn it.

Relax, guys, relax.

Which over in the chat.

So much calmer.

Yeah, over in the chat. There’s questions around. Well, how do you do that on a zoom session? And if I could take a crack at the answer, listen for the concept and the specific methods may be different from one thing to another. I give a simple thing that I’m hearing you talk about this and go, oh, I do that. For this other. If I’m speaking, I do my best because this is the thing that looks horrible when you’re in front of 140 people. As much as I’m the don’t assume intent. I’m crossing my arms, maybe I’m cold and the nipples are poking through. We don’t know yet. A client came in one time. She goes, I’m not sitting like this because I’m blocking rapport. I spilled spaghetti sauce on myself.

And that was back in the days where I wore a tie and I went, is that barbecue sauce? She goes, oh, good. I just gotta get rid of this damn fear. So being in the moment, like, if I’m presenting something and I know my presentation, I’m gonna organize it in my head into 3X and I set timers on the watch that buzzes and pokes me at that time. So it’s where, again, the mechanism itself is gonna change from any one person to another. Yes, that’s the most malleable part of all of this. But it really comes down to what are the things we can. I’d really say take away so that we have no other option but to actually be there with that person.

There’s one more thing I wanted to chat with you on here, which this is probably going to induce the opposite.

Of confidence with some.

Yet it’s one of the things that. Let’s go for the process on this one here. It would be that I heard you at one point talk about intentionally putting yourself into a scenario in sessions where you had no other option. But to figure it out. And one of the stories I remember is that of, oh, let me just use the same story with everybody and just, I have to make it work. And again, kind of goes against what.

We just talked about. But look at this as an example.

Of how do we build that resilience? How do we build that unflappable ability in our sessions? So intentionally putting yourself into a scenario.

Where you just have to figure it out.

Yeah, I’ve had a different career because I’m not allowed to screen clients. I just. The way my. My career has gone, I’ve been assigned clients by physicians or whoever, and I just have to see people, and I don’t get to say, oh, they’re not a good, you know, fit what. I don’t get to do any of that. I don’t get to screen anybody. If they got sent to me, I have to see them or I get sent to them because sometimes I’m in their facility. Whatever I did do this, the thing that Jason just talked about, I decided as a mental exercise.

I’ve done it a couple of times where I’ve said, I’m going to intentionally figure out how to use the same narrative story or the same technique, not the two at the same time, because you have to shift to the other one. So if it’s the same technique, I’ll change the metaphors around it. If it’s the same story, I’ll change the technique around it, if that makes sense. But it forces me to sit with the client, go, I don’t have a clue how I’m going to use this piece. With this client, I know how to use. I know how to help this client, but not with this piece. So I’m going to have to ask extra questions to get there. We see this in trainings where you say, all right, everyone break up into groups and work on this issue.

And the person says, you know, your practice partner explains their thing, and it’s not really a good fit for this session you’ve just been practicing with. And so then you have to raise your hand, and the instructor comes over and you ask her a question, and then she tells you what to do, and then you work on it. That. But you just do that without an instructor. And the other person’s not a client, other. Not a practitioner. They’ve just paid you. And so you just say, okay, we’re going to need to sit here and really just keep asking them questions until I figure out how this piece will fit. And when I do that, I just say to A client, I’m not ready yet. I have a couple more questions.

And they love that when you tell a client you’re not ready because you have more that you want to know about them, they feel valuable and important and. Or you tell them, this is great, you are fitting exactly right down the fairway. I’ve seen this a million times and you’re not surprising me. I’m looking for surprises and I’m not seeing them, which is really great news. You get to just be a textbook success case. And they say, really? You say yes, because that’s the entire hypnosis session. And then you ask them a couple more simple questions. And that moment, I want to emphasize this because it’s not techniquey. It is a moment of that unflappable confidence. It not arrogance, not cockiness. It’s. There’s humility behind it. But with it is a. I believe that this person wants to get better enough.

And I believe that I’ve learned enough about this that I can not screw it up for them. I can put them in state, I can give them the metaphor set and I can get out of the way. And if I. And that is easy. And that allows me to just be present for it. And I feel genuinely like I am an audience member watching them get themselves better, often, more often than I think people expect. I see my job as being an audience member. They need a person that can witness their success, can witness their triumph, can witness this weird abstract thing called hypnosis, making their life better. And I know how to ask them the follow up questions to calibrate and track their progress. And so I am the scale they stand on to see their weight loss.

I am the thing that says, oh, wait, notice that you used to do this issue 10 times a day and now you’re only doing it once a week. This is amazing. Or the sentences where you say to a client, hey, you came here skeptical a month ago and I just want to point out that the things that you thought were impossible, you’re not even giving yourself credit for right now. I just want you to give yourself credit for doing what you said a month ago couldn’t be done. And now it’s not even good enough. You’ve raised your own bar, you’ve raised your own standards, what a cool thing. But hey, cut me some slack. I didn’t do a whole bunch of stuff. So let’s just keep me with where were a month ago and you start calling this success.

So I’ve succeeded and now let’s just talk about what’s going on with all this cool stuff that you’re experiencing and that moment that just being present and showing them that it makes all your sessions easier. Guys, you don’t have to go in with an outline of what I’m going to do. You don’t need to go in with a script book that you pull out when their eyes are closed. You don’t need to have bullet points of anything. You are with them. And that presence, especially in this world, this is a very disconnected world of people who don’t feel heard, they feel transmitted or people transmitting to them. But that one to one connection is magic right now. So that’s my thing.

Hey there, it’s Jason. And this is the afterthought part of the podcast. This is where I come on and it’s just you, it’s just me. And we have a quick conversation here, which I might be talking through most of this here, but I wanted to share a couple of nuances of the conversation you just heard, plus a couple of technical business updates along the way, which is that yes, I partnered with Scott and Stephanie to help them to build out HTCive 365. And yes, I’m one third of that project. I am not, however, one third of the conference. We’ve been transparent about that since the start of this, though it does bring up an interesting moment and this is not really revealing anything private behind the scenes.

But there was a quick moment where I proposed an idea that was, hey guys, if you let me completely rebuild the online ecosystem of the conference, that will better help us to position htlive365. And if you go to htlive.net, the website that you would see there visually looks almost identical to what it was before and previously. It was built on WordPress. We rebuilt it on the ecosystems that I use on clickfunnels and we kept it looking more or less the same. We added a few more pages, but because now everything is inside of the same ecosystem, I point out a very magical thing that we’re able to do that was something I used to do with other software platforms, but required a bunch of integrations.

And now it’s something we can do very easily, which is if somebody signs up for, let’s say the conference or one of the pre or post workshops, because it’s all within one ecosystem now, it can tell whether or not that person who is signing up for the conference, if they’re already a member or not of htlive365 and this is magic, because if they’re already a member, they sign up for the conference. They then immediately go to the confirmation page, hey, we’ll see you soon. If they’re not yet a member, it then tells the story of what is HT Live365. It explains some of the value that’s inside of it, and then it introduces a private opportunity to get the first month at a rather generous rate.

So the ability to do that sort of thing inside of one ecosystem turned out to be one of the massive benefits of bringing it all in place. Now, the other part, I will respectfully pat myself on the back as I say this next part out loud. Which is part of their strategy for promoting the conference, building out their community, was that Scott would go live or he would upload a video into their private hypnothoughts group on Facebook. And I looked at that and went, never assume everybody has seen everything you’ve ever done, because there’s gotta be a lot of people who, you know, actively engage with you, but they haven’t seen that yet or they miss one. So what if we did this? And here’s all we did. We started to multi purpose the video that Scott would put out to the Facebook group.

We would then also turn that into a blog post. And in addition to the same video, there’d be a button underneath it that would then link to the social media resource, the social media asset. Then we would pull a transcription of the entire video, which we’ll put this in the show notes worksmarthypnosis.com 461 the platform that I use for this is one called Fireflies AI. And then we would take that transcription, and I’ve kind of tweaked over time the AI prompt. At the time of this recording, I used to use ChatGPT for this. I’m finding this specific prompt that I used worked better over in Claude AI from Anthropic. And of course, those technologies change every single day. But at the time of this recording, I’m currently using Claude for this, to set up the ecosystem for it. And then here’s what it does.

It takes that full transcription and then it pulls out five primary bullet points that are written with a specific prompt. That’s toward the language of write this in a way that, you know, gives a preview of what’s talked about in the video as well as builds curiosity and gets people to want to actually watch the video and consume the material. So it’s that combination of the blog posts as well as the Transcription as well as the video as well as the listen carefully the external linking to a social platform that’s also then pointing back to the website itself. They have dramatically climbed up the search engine results in the last two and a half years as a result of this strategy, along with several others. So I wanted to come on and share this real quick.

Not just for the technology that’s possible of, you know, something that’s a big part of what I put in people’s businesses when we consult them on all things business websites, funnels. Find out more about that service and what I do over@hypnosis website.com I always have to say, yes, it actually was available and I got it. Hypnosis website.com though, for those of you out there that have been trying to, I have to say it this way, trying to game the system, trying to go, oh, I just need better SEO. But you have not put any valuable content actually on your websites. I just walk you through in real time.

In the last five and a half minutes since I’ve been recording this afterthought section, I just walked you through an exact strategy of repurposing existing content, boosting social media engagement, because the blog post now also points to the social strategy. And even better, check this out everybody. When one of those videos gets published, it also then gets emailed out to their entire, you know, following of people online who are subscribed to their emails, which are now bumping up the engagement of the website, bumping up the engagement of their private Facebook group, which that’s a whole other conversation because Facebook kind of let me use the polite term, pooped the bed in terms of how they used to prioritize Facebook communities and now it’s different and not as good.

My understanding of it is that they were going to roll out something new and then they changed the existing things and the new things still haven’t shown up yet. And it’s stupid. Mark, if you’re listening, yeah, you heard me, Zuckerberg. But look at how that content is getting more sets of eyes. And on top of all of this, Search engine optimization isn’t just about the linking structure, it’s about the content. It’s also about the fact that people are actually going to your stuff. And time on page, it can tell if people are actually going to your stuff and actually staying on the page and consuming the content here. And I just walk you through a very simple strategy of how we massively got them to climb up the search rankings.

And as a result of that, you know, it’s paying off in terms of memberships, it’s paying off in terms of people coming to the conference. And every single one of you out there right now, don’t you dare listen to what I just said and go, yeah, but I’m not a conference. That doesn’t apply to me. Yes, it does. What’s the thing that you record talking about? Hey. Here are three things you need to know if you want to improve your confidence with public speaking. And then you talk about that and then introduce hypnosis as the mechanism to help them out.

And.

And then you give them the call to action. That’s why there’s a button on this page to schedule a call with me for a free consult so that we can set the plan in motion to get rid of this fear. You know, everything I just said can be applied to that. And now what are you doing? You are repurposing. Multipurposing is the better term here. Existing content. You can then run it through something like Fireflies AI to then get a transcript. You know, create your own AI prompt for the actual bullet point features of it. Tell it to use active verbs, by the way. Active verbs. Run is an active verb. Running is the gerund form of the verb. I’ve got a trademark on hypnotic language hacks. You gotta let me nerd out on language here.

But using more active verbs for more persuasive and, you know, intentional time based immediacy to it. That was essential sentence. And then on top of that asking yourself, how can I get more sets of eyes in front of this? And this is the thing that I’ve done in my business for many years now. It’s not always the game of what else can I create. It’s instead also the game of how do I get more sets of eyes and more ears on the stuff that I’ve already created. That is really good. And if you want an example of that, you just listen to it with this week’s episode. This was a conversation that happened in December 2024 and we are now putting it out as a podcast which. Oh, by the way, worksmarthypnosis.com 461. When you go there, what happens to also be there?

Well, when you go to that page, it has the podcast player for this episode. It also has some bullet points of the show notes of this episode, which we actually have a team that helps us to produce those and we do the final draft of that. Then if you dig down deeper, there actually is a transcription of this episode on this page. And what if I just described to you exactly how at least part of the strategy, if you go to Google and you do an organic search for hypnosis training, worksmarthypnosis.com shows up on page one now, and that’s not done with paid traffic. That’s not done by trying to game the system. That’s by creating the content that I know my audience would be interested in. And depending on the day, we’re kind of dancing between spot number three, four, and five.

And you have to scroll down because Google wants to show the AI summaries of things. It wants to show ads first. Then it actually shows the organic search listings. And praise be the Internet, I’m now on page one. And I just walked you through part of the exact strategy of that. Now, do you have to record 461 podcasts to do that? I mean, you could, but you also heard how, here’s something that I may put out to YouTube or any other platform. And the question then becomes, who else needs to hear this? Who else needs to see this? How do I get more sets of eyes in front of it? Duplicate yourself. That’s how you easily grow. If you want help with that, check out hypnosis website.com thank you for listening to the Work Smart Hypnosis podcast with Jason Linett.

The more we’re all successful, the more we’re all successful. I’ve made that statement for years. It’s why I do this show. And here is one thing that you can do today to help do your part. Go to worksmarthypnosis.com podcast. Go there and make sure you’re subscribed on your favorite podcast platform. And if you’ve enjoyed this episode, I’d love it if you’d leave a review. Your feedback helps other hypnosis professionals find the show. Subscribe and share your thoughts [email protected] podcast.