Session #115: Chris Thompson on Clearing the Junk

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This is the Work Smart Hypnosis podcast, session number 115, Chris Thompson on Clearing the junk. Welcome to the Work Smart Hypnosis podcast with Jason Lynette, your professional resource for hypnosis training and outstanding business success. Here’s your host, Jason Lynette. So there’s a theme that’s popped up several times on this program now, and the theme is that sometimes the best hypnosis training you could ever reach for the best hypnosis training you could ever be a part of, sometimes doesn’t come from the hypnotist.

And I’ll give you a simple example of that. Uh, in terms of my own journey of my own health and my own self improvement, I interact with quite a number of health and wellness related podcast, whether they’re, uh, something in terms of strength training or nutrition. There are themes that come from interacting with this information that, first of all, have wonderfully benefited me.

But secondly, these themes have begun to infiltrate their way into my sessions as I’m working with weight loss clients, where there’s places that are appropriate to bring these themes in. They, as we’re doing the emotional release work, as we’re doing the personal transformation work, sometimes moments of just simply hypnotic pattern that would fold their way into a weight loss hypnosis session.

Again, this hasn’t come from any hypnosis script book that you could find somewhere online perhaps. So on a similar. , The story goes, at least from my side of things. I met a hypnosis convention going back at least about maybe seven, eight years ago, I believe. And I’m listening to someone teach a business strategy, and I simply raise my hand and ask a follow up question.

And in response to my question, this person basically reveals that he has not personally used the technique that he’s. , which, sorry, but not sorry, means this person shouldn’t have been teaching it. And thus the branding of hypnosis business, Guinea pig, that I’m not going to ever teach you something that I haven’t personally hopped and tested myself.

So it’s where I began a journey of, yes, interacting with hypnotists. What’s working now, which is gonna become a theme inside of this podcast session here this week. So learning from others. What’s working, what are you currently doing? What’s making the phone ring? What’s helping you? But at the same time, Breaking away from our little bubble of a hypnotic profession and tracking what were the multimillionaire information marketers doing, What were people doing in real estate that was working.

So beginning to track business training in places that wasn’t necessarily how to get hypnosis clients and how to book hypnosis shows. So it’s where I would buy digital courses, all about running webinars. I would, uh, seek out, uh, textbooks in terms of copywriting. And this is a helpful little anecdote because it leads into the story of the session here today, which is where I often would attend.

Uh, it’s called the Traffic and Conversion Summit. It’s a marketing convention put on by the crew over at Digital Marketer dot. and I’m there at this event. And as you might expect, uh, there’s a lot of people perhaps there in real estate investment. There’s a lot of people there who are selling, uh, physical products.

There’s folks that are there, uh, with some sort of educational resource. And needless to say, like it would be anywhere else, there weren’t a lot of hypnotists. So for someone to say as soon as they met me, Oh, I met another one of you. Did you know he’s here? And I’m going, Who? And that’s where I found myself in the hallway for the first time meeting.

Chris Thompson. Chris Thompson, Hailes from Canada. And, uh, to rewind part of this story back, you can actually go to session number 72 of this program. That program was, uh, Mike Mandel on Pushing Boundaries. You’re gonna hear the story that there was young Chris Thompson at university and there, during the welcome week of his college education, Mike Mandel came and did a stage hypnosis show.

And fast forward the story many years later, the two are now business partners. And Chris, in his own right, is an outstanding hypnotist, a phenomenal instructor, and just a brilliant mind in terms of the business side of things. And you’re gonna learn from this interaction here that it’s not just about the idea of what’s making the phone ring, what’s making the.

Price of this thing able to increase not just the nuts and bolts, cuz we’re gonna talk about themes of building rapport with your audience, building that community, building that connection with your potential client. So you’re gonna hear inside of this that we’re always working to bring it into the theme that maybe you’re a fellow instructor and you’re looking for more mechanisms to serve more students.

Or at the same time, we’re gonna spend time really unpacking a specific strategy that I’m currently using, which is helping me to book a lot of clients at a high dollar, high value. So inside of this, we kind of jump all over the place in terms of health and wellness strategies, in terms of cultivating a community, as well as some interesting time spent on unpacking.

What do you do when a specific hypnotic strategy? Doesn’t work, and how do you go in and work from the right perspective to make that work, as I like to say, more good or better. Uh, I’ll give you a couple of things to check out in the meantime. And of course, links to all of this will be over in the show notes [email protected], uh, as I’d, uh, playfully phrase it the second best podcast in the hypnosis profession.

Uh, well, we’ll phrase it this way. The best, uh, one with two hosts. There you go. Uh, check out the Brain Software podcast. You could check that out on iTunes. You can also get the details of that [email protected]. That’s the regular podcast with both Chris Thompson and Mike Mandel that comes out on a regular basis.

Uh, also, just simply check out Mike Mandel hypnosis.com. Uh, you’re gonna hear some details, some of the history behind some of their products, some of their training. And also on that page, you’re gonna be able to find information about upcoming live trainings, such as the architecture of hypnosis, as well as the pre-conference offering and hypno thoughts live, the foundations of Ericsonian Hypnosis.

Full details of all of these good things [email protected], the title of this program. I will let you, uh, figure out on your own where it came from, but you’re gonna hear an amazing personal productivity strategy that Chris shares, which, uh, helped to title the session. As well as several inappropriate, uh, previous drafts of the title.

So with that in mind, let your imaginations wander. This is a content packed session as we like to say. Uh, several knowledged bombs are dropped inside of this one. So here we go. Thanks so much, Chris, for being on the program session number 115, Chris Thompson on Clearing the junk.

Uh, Jason, it goes way back and I don’t even remember how far, but I do remember that when I was a kid, probably 12 years old or something like that, my father and I were having a conversation and I thought the idea of hypnosis was fascinating, cuz of course back then, you know, every kid thinks it’s mind control and you can make your friends do crazy things or whatever, and it, it absolutely is.

And that’s the end of the podcast. Thanks so much for being on here, . That’s good. I love it. No, no, go on. And, and of course, you know, I’m sure I’m not alone in being one of those skinny little kids who just w was never the tough kid in school. And so the idea of being able to do things with your brain that would create this sense of power was awesome.

And little did I know, of course, later on I discovered all of the real truths about hypnosis. , but at the time I was interested. It didn’t do anything about it. I didn’t learn about it. I just thought it was a really cool topic. Now, fast forward to about the age of, I guess I had just turned 18, so it was the early nineties and I was in university as my first year in engineering school.

I studied at Carlton University in Ottawa, and so do you guys have Frosh week? I don’t know if everyone around the world will know what that means. Maybe we should explain what it is. I’m sure the concept is here, but probably a different name. Yeah, different, probably different names anywhere, but it’s basically party week for, Yeah, you, you start your first year of university or college in the states and there’s a bunch of activities for the first year students.

It’s usually organized by some sort of student committee made up of second, third, fourth year students that are your leaders and you know, there’s all kinds of fun things and Yeah, most common it’s called a welcome week over. Yeah, Occasionally lots of booze and other crazy antics, but one of the shows that happened to be on the agenda that I went to and I thought was really cool was a stage hypnosis shown.

I know you’ve done a lot of stage hypnosis in your life while back then. In 1992 it was Mike Mandel and so he came to the university and he did a stage. . And this was just to me mind blowing cuz I thought, Oh, this will be interesting. I’ve always been interested in hypnosis. It’ll be fun to see what it’s all about.

And it was, it was pretty cool to me because I went in with fresh eyes. I thought, well, you know, people have said it’s a bunch of fake act acting going on. And I saw stuff happening on stage that I just could not reconcile in my brain as faking it. The people who were told that they would feel like they were offended by somebody in the front row and they would tell that person exactly how they felt in Chinese , but it’s somewhat guy who doesn’t speak Chinese and you’re going.

I don’t even think a, an award-winning actor could fake it that well. Mm-hmm. . So there, there’s no way this guy’s faking it. And then I saw another guy who thought he was gonna be blown up on a planet and star, uh, Scotty from the Starship Enterprise had to beam him back up. But Scotty was of course on a coffee break and Mike Mandel was playing the part of Scotty and it was hilarious.

And this kid is just about to wet his pants. I’m keeping it family friendly and I, I realize, This stuff going on. There was a lot more to it, obviously, but that fascinated me and made me realize this is legitimate. These people are having these experiences, and it went on from there. Um, I don’t know how much you want me to keep going on the story, but No, that’s fantastic.

And we tend to bounce around in this. I mean, what was it from that experience that, that there’s a conversation that often pops up that there’s this us versus that mindset. And it’s a topic that’s been brought up here several times, of course. But to bring that experience now into most of your time is spent talking and doing work of a, let’s put it in the language of a therapeutic mindset or change work mindset to, to experience that stage hypnosis first and now be in the realm of mostly doing hypnosis for positive change.

What is it that bridges that gap for those people who would say it’s a, it’s a different conversation I think, um, I’m not really sure how to answer that best, but this is how I’m going to answer it. What what it did for me by seeing the entertainment side of it first was teach me that there’s a performance aspect to it.

And I know you’ll appreciate this cuz of your background, but just not taking yourself too seriously all of the time so that you can have fun in life. I think that’s an important concept, but in terms of doing change work with people, I think making sure that you deliver an experience for them and having an entertainment background or, Oh, I don’t have one.

But certainly watching Mike and modeling him through many, many years, cuz he’s my business partner, for those of you listening who don’t know, um, that has been a tremendous asset. So being able to see the entertainment angle, the per, not necessarily the entertainment, haha, but that, wow, this is something I want to pay attention to because we all know that a big part of hypnosis is focused attention.

And so if you can give somebody an experience to focus on, I think the hypnosis will work even more effectively. And there’s the old phrase of trading TRAs of, you know, here’s my fear of flying trance and now here’s my flying comfortably trance. And to just give that experience that another option I always flash to, you know, the best learning lesson in life is the infomercial at three in the morning, because there’s gotta be a better way that I love it.

Yeah. . So then from there, uh, was it all hypnosis from that point forward or what was the career path after that? No, it’s, yeah, so when I was, I started my first year of university when I had just turned 18. I’m a September ba baby. So when, uh, 1992 hit, I had just turned 18, saw Mike did a stage show and really did nothing with it.

I was a first year engineering student, so, you know, my life was calculus and algebra and physics and all that other stuff. So that was occupying, you know how to buy it? Oh yeah. All my, yeah, we were the cool kids. Um, so that year went on, but. Because I enjoyed my experience during that, that party week, that frost week so much.

I volunteered to be a facilitator for my second year, for my third year, for my fourth year. It was just a, a tremendous experience for me. And what happened in the second year is, so now we’re 1993. They brought Mike back, but this time this happened to align with a time in Mike’s life when he redefined himself as a communicator, not just a stage hypnotist.

And so he started doing brain software workshops earlier in the day. the same night of the show, so the same night that he was gonna do his stage performance show, he had been scheduled to do an afternoon, like two hour, let’s say, Keynote or something like that. I think it was two or three hours. And so, because I knew he was coming back and I had already seen Histo show the prior year, I of course wanted to go to this brain software presentation and it.

It was my first experience to anything that had to do with what we now know, of course is nlp, Simple NLP techniques, classic code stuff, new code stuff. Stuff where you were just standing still, stuff where you were moving around much more John Grinder approach. But it was fascinating to me. And I remember he taught one simple strategy, which wasn’t really an NLP strategy, it’s more of a power language strategy cuz he really combined a lot of the NLP techniques with power language.

And he taught a simple technique, which we still teach to everybody to this day, which we call agree and repeat. So just the idea that if somebody is trying to guilt you into something, or let’s say you go to a store and they say, Oh, we don’t give refunds, but you wanna refund. You say, Well I’m, I’m sure you don’t agree with them, but I wanna refund anyway, repeating your original request.

And if you just keep doing that. And the rule of thumb was taught us back in 93 is how many times do you have to ask one more time than they say no. And it was mind blowing to realize that you could just outlast somebody like that. and you would get what you want and you would stop people from manipulating you.

You would get refunds where people claimed that, you know, they didn’t offer refunds, but you know, you were being ripped off and it was powerful. It was, it was phenomenal. So that got me very interested in more than just the entertainment side of it, but how can I use this stuff in an influential and a positive way in my own life?

Now, from that point onwards, essentially the end of that presentation, he handed out a reading list to those who were interested. So I went through the reading list and it was, you know, patterns of the hypnotic techniques of Milton h Erickson or, um, I think unlimited power or. Um, it was either one of the Tony Robbins books was on that list.

Um, some of the Bandler grinder books were on the list. So I started reading through these things, getting fascinated with Eric Sonian hypnosis. And back then of course I thought, Well, Eric Sonian, it’s the only way to go. Cuz Mike, during his stage show would preframe that he was, um, more of an Eric Ericsonian.

And I think he was doing this of course. Now that I understand it as part of the pre-talk, to build up a, a sense of a. You know, he’s talking about stuff that we don’t understand and it makes sense that he’s the man, right? So back in those early days, I really only thought, man, if you, if you don’t understand ericsonian hypnosis, you just don’t deserve to be doing this

So anyone who’s doing that old style of hypnosis, that’s just in effect crap. Well, now of course I understand that it’s, um, it’s an entire spectrum. We think that sometimes we position it as two sides of the coin, the direct and the indirect. Now we think of it more of as a spectrum. So you can be indirect or you can be very direct and you can mix it up.

You can use an indirect induction and you can get very direct when you’re doing your suggestion work or vice versa. So that’s pretty much how I got started. My, by my second year of university, I was fascinated in the topic. I was reading about it, um, , you know, using it conversationally. I thought it was fun and nothing really happened with it until, well, let’s see around.

2000 and somewhere I, So now fast forward, I’ve graduated, I graduated in 1996. I started working as an engineer in the telecom industry. Around the year 2000, I shifted over and became a cell side analyst on Bay Street, which is kind of like Canada’s version of Wall Street, and worked in that industry for quite a long time.

So really, I used all of these skills that I had learned to advance my career, to learn about career advancement and just being successful there. It was a fairly singular focus for me. Does that make sense? That does, That does. So then to catch up the story, at what point did you transition away from that and now into the hyn?

Yeah. So I started, um, without telling anyone at work what I was doing. You know, why are you taking time off or whatever. I started, uh, when I moved to Toronto, I realized at some point, Hey, I’m pretty sure Mike Bandel is from Toronto. I’m gonna look him up. And I did, and I found an organization that. Had used him as their hired gun to teach Eric Sony Hypnosis.

So of course signed up for their NLP training, which was taught by another fellow. I signed up for Mike’s Hypnosis class. Mike and I got to be quite good friends. This is probably going back to around 2002, I think. So that was my first experience getting some formal training, and it was just mind blowing.

It was really cool because I had, I had read a lot of material, so I felt like the advanced kid in the class , even though it was my first formal training, the language patterns were, were coming to me quite easily. The methods made a lot of sense, but the, the presentation that Mike gave and the instruction and his knowledge of this topic just really impressed me.

We became quite good friends and then I, I was fascinated with the topic enough that around 2007, so this is several years after already becoming quite good friends with Mike, et cetera. I was. Already starting to have thoughts about leaving the industry. I did not wanna work in the finance industry anymore.

I knew that it was, um, long term was not for me. My mom was probably the best hypnotist I ever knew, thinking back when I was a kid. She said, If you ever smoke, it’ll kill you. so much. I’ve never, I have never ever even held a lit cigarette like, or, you know, anything like that. So my mom obviously had an effect on me, but when I started working in a financial industry, she said to me, um, you, you’re gonna, you’re gonna do it for 10 years, Make your money and get out.

Mm-hmm. , . Interestingly, I left almost 10 years out. It was about 11 years after doing it. I left. But, um, to keep the lineage here appropriate. So around 2007, I had already done no hypnosis training. I had met up with a bunch of friends. We used to hold these mastermind meetings, uh, in one of the, uh, coffee shops, the Starbucks.

Downtown Toronto and we’d get, gather and, and just practice things. And one of the fellow, one of the fellows in the, in the group, one of the guys in the group, he used to, uh, come by once in a while and throw down a burned CD rom or something, DVD ROM with a bunch of material on it. One, one day in 2007, he dropped off a, a disc and it contained an audio copy of Tim Ferris’s book, The Four Hour Work Week.

Yep. Which I thought was, Wow, that’s a stupid title. Like, whatever. So he said to us, Yeah, trust me, this is, this is actually pretty good. You might want to give this a listen. , so I fired it onto my computer and, uh, side loaded all the, there’s a term you haven’t used in a while. Side loaded, nice side, loaded the audio files onto my Blackberry at the time.

And, uh, I was on my way one night to our jujitsu class, taking the street car from my Toronto office down towards the beaches area of Toronto, where we were teaching our jujitsu class. Many years after, I’ve already, uh, gotten to know Mike quite well, started listening to this audio book and I thought this is actually quite fascinating.

And, um, anyway, long story short, we as a group, the three of us who had been meeting to discuss all this stuff and, and the, the fellow who had thrown down that audio book, We all decided we were gonna put together a plan of three different businesses that we could implement in our own lives. And the two of the three, I don’t remember what the third one was, but I’ll tell you the two that I do remember.

One was I decided I would take everything I learned about language patterns and influence and apply it towards very little children because I was a young father at the time. So I came up with a product called Talking to Toddlers. That was my concept and I ended up creating an audio product and selling it.

And so that’s still to this day works. Its evergreen content. Of course, as you know, the, the techniques never, never get old and the website’s pretty old. But, uh, that went well and that gave me a real bug for the eCommerce side of things. The idea that you could create good training material, you could sell it, you could make, I don’t wanna call it passive income, cuz there’s always, as you and I Yeah, there’s, yeah, there’s always he effort.

There’s always work. But it’s as passive as you can get while still running a business, cuz there’s all kinds of things you can outsource and pay other people to do or whatever, automate. So that was pretty cool. The second one was, I thought, well, I got this buddy, Mike Mandel, he’s got these self hypnosis CDs that he sells at gigs.

Why don’t I, you know, have a conversation with him about setting up mike mandel hypnosis.com so that we can sell some of his recordings online. Because sometimes, you know, people will show up and they don’t have cash on them. Why don’t we take PayPal? So he, he bit and we launched the website and, you know, here I am as a, a Bay Street financial analyst showing up to work in a suit and tie and during, you know, whatever office time, I can sneak away from the office.

I’m stuffing some CDs and envelopes and going down to the post office and mailing them to people. . And, uh, that’s basically how it started. And we continued on and on from that point. One day I came up to Mike and said, Look, we, we should probably do a podcast because I think it would probably be a good way to expose you to a much larger audience around the world.

And so he said, Okay, let’s do it. What, what should we call it? Well, I don’t know. How about we call it Brain Software? Because that’s the same name you’ve been using during your keynotes and presentations for years. And it’s a cool name. It’s a nice metaphor. Okay. So we started the Brain Software podcast.

Back then, I wasn’t even teaching with Mike because he was still teaching under another, uh, corporate, another organization. But like for my fortuitous circumstances, eventually they decided they did not want to teach hypnosis anymore. It was a funny thing where the, um, the partner in that business at the time, She was teaching the NLP training, and anyone who would come in and take the NLP training would always hear about how awesome Mike was and want to take his hypnosis class, but it would never go the other way.

No one would ever take his hypnosis class and then hear from the other students how amazing the NLP training was. Notice I’m keeping names out of this. Yeah, yeah. and, and so well, I think ego’s got in the way and she didn’t want to do hypnosis training anymore. So Mike had told me, says, I’m pretty sure I’m gonna get fired from this organization, so when it happens, you and I are gonna do this together.

And that’s exactly what happened. I could not believe it, but he called it. And, uh, we started doing the trainings together from that point on. Well, there’s something again in these moments where you can predict that next phase. And, uh, on, on the business side, I refer to it as, gives you that wonderful gift of being able to incubate of Yeah.

You know, this is that time I had, I had left my theater career and managed my last year of doing it to only run production, which means I was working from 6:00 PM till 11:00 PM which means nine to five was all mine. perfect. Yeah. Yeah. And, and the, the thing about that story, what, what stands out in my mind is that he was so sure he knew that this was going to happen, this, uh, this departure from the business.

And I could not see it from a business standpoint. Again, me being a numbers guy, right, looking at this going. Wait a second. You just fill up seats in her building. She takes a cut of the revenue for doing, you know, really little work. I don’t understand this. Why the heck would she get rid of you? That’s just stupid.

That doesn’t make any sense. He’s looked at me and said, Chris, things don’t always make sense. Mm-hmm. , but I’m telling you this is gonna happen. His calibration skills were so well still are. Were so good. That’s what fascinated me is understanding the power of calibration, which I was just listening, and I’ll tell you, a couple of days ago, I was listening to the interview you did with Scott Sandlin and you guys brought up the idea of establishing rap rapport and calibrating and all these things that were just, People should be listening to that episode.

Lots of gold nuggets about hypnosis came up there, but calibrating your client, calibrating your friends, calibrating your business partners, calibrating your. Whoever you’re doing business with or in a relationship with, that’s such an important skill. And that experience taught me the power of calibration.

Well, there’s something to be said around, I hate to put it in this category, but typically that’s day one of a class and we can fall prey to the game of, Well, that’s the basics. I can now move on to the advanced stuff. Yeah. And unfortunately it takes so long to practice and master and you can’t just say, Oh, learn to calibrate.

Okay, let’s move on. Right. Which, it’s where the format of my office is so intentional now. Well, intentional by accident. Now I claim it as an absolute moment of brilliance that I invented in the first place. Exactly. Which is that they, they come into my space and they’re sitting in the lobby and. Then it’s the great come on back moment and that walk back, I’m learning everything I need to learn about how the last week has gone for them.

If it’s a subsequent appointment or what type of story is about to be shared in that experience that just that simple walk from, it’s only about 20 feet from the sofa in the lobby to the chair back here in my office. So you bring up the theme of, you know, the practice of it. What would you say from your perspective that now, now that you spend so much on the training side and observing, uh, Mike over the years and observing students as well?

The simple question, what makes someone really good at this? Oh, I think what makes somebody really good at this, and we’ve seen so many students through so many different backgrounds fly into Toronto from all around the world, or take our online training, which is cool too. So it’s nice to see that the, the different ways we can interact with people.

Um, the things that really stand out for me are when people gain confidence. And so we’ve, well, Mike has come up with this model. He calls it the Mandel Triangle cuz it’s his idea. It’s a great model. We’ve got confidence, congruence, and intention, and they all fit together in this weird way that’s hard to explain.

But you can imagine that if you build your confidence, you’re also gonna build your congruence and you’re also gonna build your intention, right? And when you go in with intention, you are expecting something to happen. You’re intending it to happen. And so I like to just simplify it and say, Confidence, but really either of those three phrases works well and they all feed upon each other.

When a student begins to feel confident that, for example, they can generate language on their own just like they learned English or whatever language they speak, but you know, we’re speaking English here, so we’ll stick to that. When you learn how to construct hypnotic phrases and sentences and techniques, when you learn to just deliver them without thinking about it consciously and realize that it’s the same way that you generate language unconsciously every time you’re having a conversation with anybody.

It’s an amazing thing to see people go through that transformation of, I don’t know what to say, and now, oh, I can just say whatever. Once they get the principles down and they feel that confidence, They develop their own hypnotic voice at that point. So when you listen to them, you walk around the classroom and you know they’re not just sounding like they’re having an everyday conversation.

They dial up the voice because they feel confident to do that, right? When that starts happening, I think that’s when this switch has flipped and they begin their journey towards mastering this stuff when they aren’t yet comfortable with some of the basic constructs around simple things like Eric, Sony, language patterns, then, and it’s usually the first two days in our class, so Monday, Tuesday, people are going, I don’t know what to say.

It’s okay. Silence is fine and you can repeat yourself. But then by Wednesday, these people, something has happened. And you can really tell the ones who have grasped it the best. And those are the ones who are gonna go on to become excellent. The ones who, um, really are maybe just hobby interested, they wanna learn a few techniques, but they’re not planning on using this in any meaningful way in their lives.

They, they may not get it as quickly, they may not ever get it if they don’t actually practice it. Because we all know we can throw a lot of information at you in five days. It’s like feeding people from a fire hose or drinking from a fire hose. You’re gonna catch bits and pieces of it and you’re gonna miss a lot.

And then when you go on and continue your learning, you’re gonna go, Oh, those are some of those, you know, big puddles of knowledge that I missed at the time, or, or that I was aware of, but I didn’t really absorb into my unconscious learning. Right. Does that make sense? That does, and especially, you know, confidence is probably discussed by every hypnosis trainer out there, every organization, every book.

In some form though, intention is one that you don’t hear talked about very frequently. And there’s, there’s a dialogue that I’ve often had with some people who would go, Yeah, I like all that ericsonian stuff. I like all that indirect and artful language patterns and all this NLP stuff, though I’m not really certain it works.

They say how well, but yeah, then they can’t use it. Right. , Although it’s where I’d share, there’s two sides of it. And let’s take a simple example of if, if we want to talk about spatial anchoring, that you’re going to be delivering some sort of presentation and you choose this area to be where you deliver the positive message, that area to be the negative message.

And let’s assume it’s a sales environment and you then talk about your product in the positive space and perhaps the competitors. And the negative, the, the, the argument would be, simply doing that, will that get the result? Will that get the sale? And my only re reaction to that could be maybe, Yeah. Well this is an interesting thing, right?

Do we, How do we construct in medical terminology, you could do a controlled study, right? It’s a clinical trial on this. It’s difficult to do that in a hypnotic environment, I think. But yeah, maybe Does the presenter have rap rapport with the audience? Have they got any kind of credibility? Are they coming across slimy?

Because I think if you use a spatial anchoring technique like that, but the audience feels your slimy, right? It’s not gonna work very well. Maybe works better than the other guy who’s equally slimy, who doesn’t know the technique. , but to what degree does it improve your conversion? I don’t know. Well, bringing in that theme of congruence though, at the same time, now that person is working with intention.

Mm-hmm. . So they’re doing it on purpose. They’re doing it with intention behind it, to use the word again. And the question is, which one are they hypnotizing more the audience or themselves? Either way. They’re now both. Yes. The answer is yes. Exactly. Exactly. So getting into that place where as someone who used to spend a lot of time with actors, um, the actor who wouldn’t feel comfortable just standing in the center of the space and speaking like people do, as opposed to they had to, we called it docking.

They had to lean against the doorframe. They had to lean against the sofa. They had to be holding onto something as opposed to, uh, the metaphor that’s been in my head this week. Uh, which gives you some of my intention of taste in music perhaps is here, was, uh, and I’m, I can say in some respect, I am a fan in some way of both of these people.

Here’s a performance of Katie Perry on Saturday Night Live and doing the song yet with the benefit of 30 backup dancers in a bunch of backup singers. And it’s some sort of reunion, some sort of anniversary of the Titanic movie and there’s Celine Dion on some awards show the same weekend and she’s just standing on stage doing the song.

Yeah. And there’s benefits of both, but it’s that place of being comfortable with the language, which again, comes back to being good at this, that willingness just to jump in and play with it. I absolutely agree. And I was also think when you were telling the, uh, the story about, or when you were giving the metaphor about somebody, not metaphor not enough coffee for me this morning, Jason, when you were talking about spatial anchoring.

And, um, so let’s imagine another situation where two people, and forgive me for using the term script here, but imagine two people are handed the same sales script to deliver as a presentation to their audience. One person really believes that the product that they’re offering is awesome, and the other person’s like, uh, I don’t know.

Is this really helpful? Who do you thinks gonna do a better job? Reading the exact same script, right? . It’s pretty, We don’t even need to answer that exactly. So that intention, I think when you, and that goes back to your comment, who’s really, who’s this technique really working on? Well, if you believe that what you’re offering is amazing and helpful to people, then so tempted to say, we help people.

Right? , um, T bark pen pending. Yeah. That’s, uh, if you believe it, you’re gonna have intention, right? Because you really intend to help these people. So delivering the exact same script to a, to an audience, guess what? You’re gonna come across as much more confident, much more congruent, because you have that intention.

Exactly, Exactly. So part of our backstory was that there we were out in San Diego at the Digital Marketer Convention. Oh, you and I? Yeah. Yeah. And so I wanna bridge some of this over. I’ve got a whole bunch of, uh, bullet points and questions and themes to jump into. So, Oh, we’re gonna be jumping all over here.

I know, I know. So I hope you’ve got four hours. So, so on that tone though, um, it’s something that I feel there’s a common through line of, uh, perhaps by an appreciation of Tim Ferris, perhaps by some shared interest. We jumped into the recording at about nine 20 this morning. Uh, by that point in your day, what had you already accomplished?

Oh, well this mo well , I start the morning, I just, when I wake up I usually grab my iPad and clear out a bunch of unnecessary email, anything that’s junk. I like to, to start my day by cleaning out the junk so that when I am working later, the emails that are in my inbox are the ones that I actually have to deal with.

So I had, but I don’t work in the morning very much. So by the time we started at nine 20, I had. Had breakfast with my kids and seen them off to school and seen my wife go off to her yoga class. And normally my morning is dedicated to me. So I do all of my own personal development stuff, which includes my workout, uh, reading, so all my schema building.

So it it, if I’m learning about marketing or learning about hypnosis or learning about fitness or learning about diet and health, all of that, I consider me time, personal development, not business time. And so I do that in the morning and I typically start my so-called workday around noon, although I admit that I cheat.

And it’s so, like I said, in the morning, I’m cleaning out emails. That’s really work time, but it’s so that I can have a more focused afternoon. Um, I made that shift, uh, just to, to bring that up in December. I used to start my workday at 9:00 AM and here’s what I discovered. I would not get the most important stuff done right away.

Parkinson’s Law, usually tasks expand to fill the time allotted to them, right? So if you allot your entire day to work tasks, whoops. The day goes by and you know, it’s 2:00 PM let’s say. And oh, I haven’t gotten that key thing done yet. I better go do that. I guess I won’t be able to go to the gym today. So in December of 2016, Um, I made the change and I said, I’m only gonna work in the afternoons, and it has been a wonderful change.

So I don’t know if that is the direction you thought I was gonna take the answer, but that’s the answer. No, that is, and it’s where you go to any dialogue inside of this profession or really of anything, and it’s so often. Uh, the back to the Michael Gerber line, working on your business rather than in your bus, working in your business rather than on your business though at the same time, it’s that concept of being that individual, being that human.

And what would you say it is about that shift, which I, I had a similar shift in schedule about two years ago, and more recently it’s more compacting the day down. I used to do, um, the office days. I’d see a 10, a 12, a two and a four. And nowadays, Live sessions. I do an 11, a one 30, and a four o’clock, which compacted down that office time.

I, I, I’m gonna steal your metaphor there, Or model the excellence of the metaphor of clearing out the junk, which is, it’s where a student of mine sent me this. I, I could glance at the Facebook message yesterday and go, This is incredible what she’s sending me. I can’t respond to it now. Yeah. And it’s the benefit of just being able to go, Could you email that to me?

That way I can flag it and I will absolutely respond to it tomorrow. Um, but clearing away the junk, clearing away the stuff that’s out of the way. What is it you found by having these things accomplished? Um, which your morning sounds almost identical to mine now. Um, by having that accomplished, you’re now beginning that workday.

What’s different for you? I think what’s different for me, Honestly, it’s just that I know I have a compressed operating window for work. So I do not waste as much time on unimportant tasks, which forces me to either decide to not do them or have somebody else do them. There you go for, automate them, right?

If possible. And I know that’s getting into a whole new can of worms in terms of business discussions, and we can always go there or we can do another, another, um, podcast, another time to get more into the business stuff if anyone ever wants. But it just makes so much sense to me that if you give yourself less time, you will fundamentally force yourself.

You’ll be forced to focus on what truly matters. And so I’ll find that. Okay, let’s say I have a certain marketing campaign that I want to put together. I’ll work on constructing that. Or let’s say that, uh, I know we’ve gotta shoot a series of videos to do some sort of launch on a new, whatever, a new product or a.

Could be anything, any kind of, uh, live conference that we’re doing or, and we will immediately get to work and start creating the scripts for the videos that we wanna shoot or whatever it is. But then I’m, I’m also making sure that I’m using, So I have an employee in the Philippines that, uh, is my full-time graphics and video guy, and he’s awesome.

And so he can do a lot of work while I’m sleeping and, and uh, and of course, uh, he’s probably sleeping when I’m doing work. But it’s a beautiful thing to realize, Hey, I haven’t been making effective use of him even though I’m paying him for full-time work. Uh, why don’t I send him more stuff? So I am making sure with that compressed window that I’m looking at, well, what could I be getting him to do?

What could I be getting him to do that will open up a roadblock that’s been in, in my path to accomplishing a certain product launch or whatever it is. And. I’m finding I’m much more on top of making sure that I give him lots of work because I just don’t find that I’m a very good people manager, if I’m honest.

And so I can manage one guy, maybe if I’m lucky, but I gotta dedicate some attention every day to filling up his plate. There’s something brilliant to the side of that and couple of things to pull out of it and unpack from it, which would be that, first of all, you know, we talked about fitness, we talked about personal development, so whether it’s our own health or time for our family or continued education, the, the phrase that’s kind of defined me for the last couple of years is that there’s no such thing as finding the time.

There’s only making the time. Yeah, there’s making the time and, and you can only make the. But it’s like a full hard drive, right? Um, I’m just looking at my portable Western digital hard drive in front of my computer here. So here’s the metaphor. It’s full. There’s only so many hours in the day, or seconds or hours or whatever, or minutes or whatever you want, whatever you want to define them as, whatever you want your denominator to be, and that’s what you’ve got.

So if you have a full hard drive and you wanna do something else, store something else, you gotta delete some stuff. Or move it somewhere else, which is part of that outsourcing side thing. Yeah, exactly. Delete it from your drive. I’ve honestly been in the same, uh, conundrum myself, which is that I’ve got two people, I’ve got a full-time video, uh, person who’s dedicated just video and a full-time, uh, web and graphic person, and they both cross over in some way.

And the web person, I, I’ve kept her busy nonstop because there’s always a podcast about to come out. There’s always a series of emails to go in and punch up and make pretty, but the video side, it became Okay. Well part of it is I’ve been away for a good two weeks and I made an appoint to go, I am not working this one specific week.

The beauty of just shutting down and saying, Nope, this is not happening this week. I’ll check in, clear the junk, respond to what’s important though. It’s where, again, it, it’s inspiring at times to go, Okay, here is someone that I have dedicated time to. It’s how on the seeing clients component, this is how, at one point I had additional staff and the intention was, I have to fill this person’s schedule.

If they are committing time to be here in my office, I have to fill theirs first before I ever fill mine. And the motivational strategy that I plugged in there was, Okay, so you’re commuting about an hour to get to the office. No matter if I book the sessions or not, I’m paying you for three appointments.

I’m going to now book three appointments, if not more, because I have committed to pay you that. So it, it’s even going back to the days of doing stage hypnosis, fundraisers. And here would be the group that would just buy the show and sell tickets and whatever was left over was their profit. Or at one point I offered this ticket split option and the only groups that would actually make money were the ones that just bought the show.

Because it was that mindset of going, we gotta sell at least 120 tickets to break even on this. As opposed to the other group who was just doing a split at quote, No risk. They were the ones going Well, it’d be nice to Yeah. And they’re fully committed. Exactly. Yeah. And it’s where so often, you know, in our education side of things, I think there’s some people playing the game of it’d be nice to learn something new or it’d be nice to be a little slimer.

It’d be nice to have a little bit more money left over at the end of the year as opposed to that benefit of batching that time down. No, I’ve got 30 minutes, I’m gonna make this happen. I think it was, uh, Che Holmes in his book. Was it, Is it Ultimate Sales Machine? Or something like that. Anyway, Che Holmes talks about the, the inverse of that situation.

I think it fits well here. If you were recruiting a salesperson, who do you think you’d rather hire? The guy who wants a high base salary and a small commission, or the guy who says, No, no, no, I want all commission, no base salary. Nice. Yeah. That’s the guy you want, Right? And on the opposite side of the spectrum.

Yeah. The, the school that buys the show outright or the organization, whatever, that buys your show outright, they’re absolutely motivated to break even at minimum, and then just sell, sell, sell to make the money, and they get to keep. So there’s a theme I wanted to spend some time chatting with you about, which is, uh, the concept of, kind of similar to what we’ve talked about so far that of testing that, of running experiments so you can get as big picture in theme with this as you like, or laser focused, uh, in terms of the business side of all that you do, what’s working now.

Okay. Before I go into the business stuff, I’ll just, because you said testing and you gave me card wash to say whatever I want here in hypnosis, the same thing is true. We get a lot of people who will say, Well, what do you think about this as an idea for induction and our idea for change work? And our reply is always the same unless it’s a just a bad idea.

Would you say, Test it out, see what happens, Right? So testing all I wanted to really make the point of there is testing is a good idea, right? Because we do not know what works and the human species has evolved scientifically, medically, whatever, because people conduct experiments. So it makes sense to do that.

So from a business standpoint now, um, what is working now? Uh, I, I think the, the big picture stuff of what works is always what’s gonna work. Building a relationship with people so that they know, like, and trust you, and I don’t mean in a tricky way, but in an ethical way. They, you want people to have a feeling that they know something about you.

They believe that you can help them in some way because you can. And then they’re much more likely to convince themselves to take action when they’re given a call to action. Does that make sense? That does, that does is where we can, uh, there’s intention sometimes, again, even back to the previous conversation about rapport, where this stuff has been bastardized in some format to say, If I sit like you, you’re gonna like me and you’re gonna buy my stuff, As opposed to a lot of the original intention was, how do we just build this relationship?

How do I start to get in sync with you and begin to unconsciously make some small modifications to be begin to pace, begin to pace, and then when appropriate begin to lead, Which it, it kind of brings in the biggest theme I wanted to chat with you about, which is c. That, that’s probably one of the things that you and Mike have done.

I feel better than most instructors out there. That it’s a real community. Thank you. Rather than just, Hey, here’s my book, here’s the next video series. Okay. Okay. I think that get you, you’ve given me some ideas on talking points that I hadn’t considered yet. Then, so in terms of what’s working, I said big picture, building that relationship and that rap rapport and that, Well, who are people going to have rap rapport with?

They’re gonna peop, they’re gonna have rap rapport with people who make them feel good when they’re around. Right. So when you see a video of Mike and I doing something, let’s say, and you feel good about it, you go, Oh, that’s awesome. I like that. I like how they threw that joke in there. It’s just unconscious.

Right? Oh, haha. That was a good joke. But this material is really good, solid material. It’s delivered with congruence and intention, and I like those guys. That’s the kind of experience that’s gonna help us. And if you’re a hypnotist, I know as you are, Jason, obviously doing a lot of the stuff with clients every day, people who see you on, and I wanna make sure, the reason I’m talking about this is to bring it back to someone who isn’t running a hypnosis training business, but is a hypnotist seeing clients.

The same thing is true. So this isn’t what makes Chris and Mike so great, or what makes Jason so great about our online training business. This is about how can you take these same concepts and distill them into your own business And that if that business is see clients, then so be it. And the idea is you put good quality information out there that people can relate to so that they just, they want more and they’re an easier prospect to help when they call you.

Right? So for us, what’s working is video and community. Video and community are probably the two biggest things. That’s absolutely a good point. Now, do you want me to go into more on the community side? No, this is great because again, it’s where we often would interact with that person who maybe wants to book more clients or perhaps the stage side.

They want to book more shows. And, uh, I flash back to the classic seed and the graduate, I’ll tell you the future plastics , where, where they want that one simple answer of you have to do this. Uh, before we turned on the recording, we were cracking the jokes around, um, uh, what was it from the office. Uh, I hear do you think YouTube is gonna be here?

Or, um, Facebook Live is gonna be here. Facebook Live is gonna be here. Yeah. So it’s where they’re sending their people. Yeah. Where we think that it’s gonna be one simple answer, but really it, it’s that bigger picture perspective of what is this actually serving the purpose of? And it’s where I, I think you guys would agree with the state.

that to really do this properly there, if I had to unpack a strategy to put it out there, which is gonna sound like a slight negative, but it’s not in any way. It’s the mindset of to do things just because it’s going to benefit the audience and there’s no direct monetary connection to it. Yes. And I would, uh, I will offer you this, this strategy that I learned from Mike and it.

The strategy of asking yourself, what is this an example of? Right? So if you, if you have a video, let’s say that you put out there and that video is just giving away some good quality information, you say, Well, what is that as an example of, that’s an example of helping people, Let’s say, you could answer it in any number of ways, but you might say, Well, that’s an example of helping people.

Okay, So helping people’s a strategy then, Right? Of course it is. Because what’s helping people gonna do for you? Well, it’s, it’s gonna, What’s that? An example of helping people is gonna make people like you and trust you and wanna hire you. So that’s good. Right. Absolutely. Well, it’s again, where to, to not look for the direct result that, again, we talked about testing and sometimes you’d hear the conversation of, Oh, I tried that.

That didn’t work. Yeah. Which on paper, I’m sure the two of you and definitely me, I can list hundreds of things that if I tried to put them on paper and say, What was the result? You know, you could say, Well, that didn’t work yet. Meanwhile, okay, here is this appearance at this convention. Here was this podcast session, here was this webinar that there was no sales message at the end of yet.

Again, it’s that value of that community sharing that experience, and it’s where to just have that conversation is building that connect. . Yeah. I’ll offer you a metaphor here that I came up with a long time ago when I was working as a stock analyst. So, and of course I’ve always been an investor most of my life in, in growth and technology stocks, and I’m a tech geek.

So a lot of the times I will have a conversation with somebody about some business, Let’s say, let’s just pick an example like Apple. And, um, you know, so you say to somebody, Oh, Apple makes fantastic products. I’m gonna invest in shares of Apple. I think Apple’s a great company. And the person will say, Well, I just can’t ever see myself using a Mac or using an iPhone.

I, I just, I, I find they’re overpriced. That that just doesn’t work for me. So I’m not gonna invest in that business because that, that just doesn’t work for me. They’re personalizing it. Like their opinion is the only one that matters. And so to bring this back to hypnosis, of course those people miss out on great ideas, right?

So to bring it back to hypnosis and, or really anything, if somebody says, Well, you know, I tried that. It didn’t work for me. I think that what you’ve gotta do is depersonalize it and. Is this working for others? Right? Is this working for other people? And if it is and you have to genuinely look at it on an unbiased perspective, maybe you just suck at it right now, right?

Maybe you’ll get a lot better. Maybe you’re just doing it wrong. Is this helping other people in some way? Yes. Then model what works and test and test and experiment until you figure out what it is that is working well. Um, this reminds me because I, you know, I have no background in stage hypnosis whatsoever, but I’ve heard Mike tell the story many times that back in 1975 when he was learning to do stage hypnosis, he was just throwing stuff together, just multiple suggestibility tests and that was creating the hetero action and people would go into trance.

And when he experimented to try to take stuff out that he didn’t think was essential, cuz he didn’t know it was essential at the time, does a hand class test and the entire audience, or an audience, the entire, uh, stage full of volunteers, boom. Their hands come apart. And as he likes to say, the rest of the night was a horrendous blur, right?

Well, he didn’t know what was critical. So if you are judging a technique in marketing or a technique in hypnosis, whatever it is, any technique in life from the perspective of, Oh, well I tried that, it didn’t work. Well, maybe you just didn’t know what part was essential, and maybe the essential parts are the ones that you screwed up, right?

So it really does make sense to back up and say, Who is this working for? What are they doing? How can I model that? Yeah, I’d share. There’s a previous, uh, session that I had with Terry Stokes and he was talking from the stage hypnosis environment around, you need to know why the routine is. That he was talking about someone who had copied one of his routines and it wasn’t working for the person because they didn’t understand why it was funny and they were mimicking what their is, where someone retails a joke and it just doesn’t get the same reaction.

And to bring that back into the hypnosis though, I chair, there’s a personal moment where I could run a standard swish pattern on a client and get a good result and teach it to them. My, my branding of moments that I do with clients is, yes, I have audio programs, but I also discount the need for them because I go, Well, I could leave you in a scenario where you’re going, I need a dark room in a CD player for 35 minutes.

Or I can teach you self hypnosis. How do it self hypnosis strategies you can do anytime, anywhere, and nobody knows you’re doing something. Exactly. Which nearly any pattern can fit into that. Any anchored response can fit into that. It gives me a wide open spectrum. Oh, sure. Which is its own little us p and it’s the way that I’d prefer it to be if I was the client.

So the swish pattern though, was one. , Okay, I could run this with clients yet, here are some things that I personally want to change, but it’s not working with me. And I could shut down that part of the brain to go, Okay, your opinion doesn’t matter cuz it’s working with other people the same way that, uh, I, I love the theme of all things, diet, nutrition, fitness, exercise, all this stuff works.

It just depends on your goal. Um, yeah, there’s a strength building podcast I was listening to on the drive in this morning and someone’s going, Should I do this type of squat or that type of squat? And the guys hosting this gave the great reaction of, well, it depends on your goals. Are you a power lifter?

If that’s the case, here’s what you should do. Are you the weight lifter? If that’s the case, here’s what you should do. Are you training for a sport? If that’s the issue. So basically, here’s five answers to your one question. Choose your exactly. Choose your own adventure. So from the Swish story though, it was one of going, I’m going to make this work for me.

I’m going to figure out what’s the disconnect, what’s the flaw that I’m having? So that way when a client comes in and they have the same issue, we can go in and resolve. and we can now make this work. Which again is, uh, to use the phrase, standing on the shoulders of greats, this is a technique that we know about because it works.

So is there a key distinction that you learned in analyzing your application to the swish pattern then Jason? Uh, the basics were that I’m a very auditory person. I had to bring in the auditory. I say that as of course now we’re recording an auditory only podcast. Uh, the other was that eliciting my own organic submodalities.

So rather than going, rather than going, this is where it ought to be is some Yeah. It’s supposed to be a bright, shiny object really close to me and I’m gonna push it far away. No, the poster stamp has to be in the bottom right. Damnit . Exactly. Which I mean was something that I was absolutely, was stupid. I was absolutely doing that with clients just by calibrating.

You can tell by their body language, from their eyes, from where they’re looking. They’re telling you where their stuff is. Mm-hmm. yet running it for myself, I was running the cookie cutter pattern. Yeah, I think that’s a really nice distinction because it shows you that the technique, while you could be very directive in telling them, I want you to imagine that this small postage, stamp sized other image that’s about to grow and replace that other nasty image, and it’s gonna come in from the bottom left of the screen and you’re giving them all these things that don’t need to be there.

You can just let them decide. Right? So to play the game, of course, of bouncing around, I personally share the, the business product that I sell, uh, sold horribly for the first six months to the point that it was almost the thought of, yeah, this just isn’t the right market. And I was hearing a lot of doom and gloom from the hypnosis profession.

Yeah, these people don’t buy business products. And then six months into it, then something clicked. I found the right mechanism. And then the old phrase of, well, not really the old phrase, How do you tell someone that their hot cakes are selling well? . Yeah. How do you tell someone, I don’t know, selling like hot cakes?

Well, how do you tell someone their hot cakes are selling? Well, that is the most obscure reference I can pull out. It’s hilarious. I heard that before Jason. Not like that. I’d ask you. I think it was from Bloodhound Gang, the guys who, Anyway, how do you tell someone that their hot cakes are selling? Well remember that.

So is there, is there a moment in this testing conversation that we’re having where on the business side, something wasn’t quite clicking, something wasn’t quite connecting, but then you found the way to make it work? Oh, sure. Um, yeah. This is gonna go back to the time that you and I met at the Digital Marketer conference, Traffic and, and Conversion summit a few years back.

And, uh, at the time, so we had our Mike Mandale Hypnosis Academy was fairly fresh. That’s our online hypnosis training. And actually, you know, I’m gonna wrap this up in a bit of a bigger picture. So when we were teaching live hypnosis trainings, And we were doing it Monday to Friday or sometimes on, uh, op on two weekends, you know, uh, like a Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Saturday, Sunday type of thing.

And, uh, I realized it’s, you know, it’s an expensive training for a lot of people who are interested in hypnosis to fly out to Toronto and stay in a hotel. It’s not that expensive compared to Europe or the United States with our dollar the way it is now. But it’s a big investment and you’ve gotta take vacation time if you’re not self-employed.

Right. Makes sense that hey, one option, excuse me, there, uh, one alternative would be to create this online training that would allow people who are interested in learning the topic to sign up at their leisure and watch it like Netflix and go through it. Makes sense, Right? Yeah. So what I thought would happen is, and this is maybe accidental testing I guess you could call it.

I thought that we would find a lot of people would. Sign up to our online hypnosis training because they could not fit into their schedule or their budget. The live training, here’s what actually happened. People would sign up to the online training because it was available. They would love it so much that they would say in their own mind, they’re saying, Wow, if the online training is that good, I wonder how the live experience is gonna be.

I’m definitely signing up. I’m coming to Toronto, and so demand grew. So that was a good thing. I think that taught me a little bit more about this community, this establishing a relationship with the people, even if it’s one way. And I think you’ve said, what’s the, the metaphor that you’ve always offered that, uh, your, your, your mom, uh, felt like she knew Willie Nelson.

Right, Right, right, right. Yeah. I think people have probably heard you say that metaphor before. What’s the experience that you buy the album, you listen to the singer, then you go to the concert? Yeah, you’ve been listening to it over and over and you feel like you already know the artist. So when you go there, it’s like, Wow, that’s awesome.

It’s the same thing when it comes to any kind of online delivery of material when they then come and see you. And I, so in retrospect, I should not have been surprised that demand for our live training would increase dramatically as a result of us doing online training. Right? Absolutely. The, the phrase I keep coming back to is we talk about a sales funnel, and the phrase I’m living by now is position yourself at the end of the funnel.

Yeah, so I was just, then we would think it’s like we, I, I run into this so frequently. It’s a conversation that I just had at a training that someone’s going, But if you release that product, no one’s gonna take your class anymore. And yet, here’s a big class that we did recently, and the experience was most of the people in there had already bought our products.

They had already had that user experience, and they’re looking for that live experience because, to, to listen to the, the story that I always come back to is, there’s a actor that I had worked with several times that, um, the wonders of production schedules, uh, you could be in rehearsal for one play while you’re in performance for another.

So this guy had, I believe the record was he worked 72 weeks in one. Which by union contracts meant that he had overlapping contracts, but he worked nonstop for one whole year and somehow managed to fit 72 weeks of contracts into 52 weeks of the year . So this is a man that, uh, Ralph was in his early eighties, I think, when I last interacted with him.

And he had played every role in Hamlet from, you know, from the guards at the beginning of the play to Hamlet to in his later years he was polonious in this production. And he goes, At this point now, I already know all the lines. He goes, and I, every time discover something new. Every time I’m citing with a different character.

And at first I’m like, Who’s this Hamlet jackass who’s coming in and, you know, causing an uproar? Oh, and Pelonius is this upstart. No, wait. Now I can see from his side of things. So there’s something to be said around getting that live experience of the training, because we’re refining these little nuances that, that weren’t there, that were there, but we weren’t quite paying attention to yet.

Well, and that, and that’s it. And, and so I never, I never think, Oh, this person’s already taken our live training. This live class is gonna be a waste of their money. No, of course not. Because they’re getting a chance to practice, to refine, to build relationships. They gain confidence and just the confidence that they gain and being in front of an entire group of people to practice with over five days of training is immensely rewarding to them.

So it’s great. But this, this kind of comes back to that community sense that you asked me to talk about earlier, right? So, , when people feel that they’re part of that community really does help to grow your business because they will talk about you, they will refer people to you. It’s an incredible experience.

Um, I’m sure you noticed that when we first came to Hypno Thoughts in 2015, we had teachers made and we brought them and we gave them to all our students. And people say, Oh, can I buy a shirt from you? And we, I’ve never, ever accepted money for a t-shirt. Why would I? Right. It’s a gift. It’s a branding experience and it makes people feel part of our tribe.

So when we go to a conference and we, we, I, I’ll go out of my way to make sure I know which of our students are gonna be there, what size are. And I’ll bring them a shirt and make sure that I hand it to them, right? And so that, that builds community. And I think it’s a fantastic thing. We’ve got our, for our online hypnosis training, we’ve got our Facebook group, which is a great community.

I know you’re part of it as well, and. It is just a phenomenal experience to see people interacting and gaining skills and gaining friendships, and gaining, gaining more tools to help more people and growing their business, growing their confidence, whatever it is that they’re growing, they’re growing some aspect of their life that matters to them, and it’s happening inside of our, of our community.

And it only gets enhanced when they, when they come out and do a live training or attend a live event at a. And the option of that, most of the audience of this are people who are sitting in a small office, sitting with one other person doing the sessions. And this, these same concepts supply over to the hypnotherapist, the hypnotist working.

Um, or as I found the need to start posting Craig t Nelson photos in your personal group. Um, the unconscious coach . That was funny. Yeah. So the experience though of, on my website, I have on the homepage for sale, a low dollar product, call it a trip wire, uh, take. Yes. We should talk about those. Yeah. Take 10 to relax.

It’s a just a 10 minute stress relief hypnosis session, and I sell it for a low dollar amount, which makes it that trip wire concept that I’ve talked previously on here about, though it’s giving that experience of what it’s gonna be like to be in the room, which again, Position at the end of the funnel.

Um, one of the best strategies that I’ve ever used in my business, which I continuously kick myself cuz I’m not doing at the moment and I need to just pick up the damn phone and say reprint them. Uh, was that as soon as the client was back at their home, I would position it in such a way that the next day they received a thank you card from.

I heard you tell that on a podcast, and I thought that was genius. So the ability, which figuring out the long way Home had the post office that closed at six o’clock and almost like a Madlibs Gabe, sometimes I would have most of the thank you card pre-written. I’d leave a spot for, uh, a sentence to fill in to customize it.

And yes, there’s services like send out cards. Yes, there’s automated email services yet for it to be the handwritten letter with my, uh, hideous handwriting, which absolutely proved. Yeah, Jason wrote this was just that little bit of that little extra step that it’s making use of something that people don’t do anymore.

People don’t do enough of. So bringing people into the experience that you’re, you’re joining something, um, at the one hour mark, we’re turning this into a cult conversation, but if it was a cult, it’d be much more organized. So , but again, welcoming people into something rather than just, Hey, I’ve got this thing.

Who wants to buy it? , Right. Um, the welcoming and welcoming people in the, in what, which we call in the digital marketer land indoctrination. Right? And then the concept of a trip wire, which you’ve talked about a lot before. There’s just so many places we could go with this. But let me, let me ask you a question that take 10 to relax.

So it’s a $10 product, and it’s important for people to understand that the idea is to charge such a low amount of money to help people so that they feel that the, their first experience as a customer was a really good one. And hopefully if they get all the results they need from that, everyone’s better off.

You’ve got 10 bucks, they’ve got help, no problem. It’s not gonna make a difference to your life that $10. But it certainly, uh, helps your, uh, re recovering your cost of advertising it or whatever. But how did you get the person into that funnel in the first place? So did you capture their email address in some sort of what we call lead magnet, but for those who don’t understand what that means, any sort of free giveaway?

Free tutorial, something that the next step up is the take 10 to relax, $10 offer. Well, I’ve added, it’s really not really a original, uh, addition to it, but so often we talk about that funnel of being delete magnet, the trip wire, the core offer, and so forth. It’s where the initial stage of this is just simply content.

Mm-hmm. that they land on the Virginia Hypnosis website as they scroll down. There’s the welcome video 45 seconds. Hey, this is Jason Lynette. Welcome to Virginia Hypnosis. This process begins with you. I look forward to speaking with you soon, which is folding in the assumption you’re going to call me. So it’s where there’s just all this information and the trip wire concept is making use of the fact that the journey from.

$0 to a thousand is massive. And yeah, surprisingly the journey from $10 to a thousand is a lot is small. It’s a lot shorter. Once they’ve crossed that threshold of becoming the buyer, now there’s this intention that now the process continues. What I’d highlight there, and I say this not to discount that program, take note that I am not going for the absolute change in 10 minutes time.

Yeah, you’re going after. Small win, recognizable, some measurable win. Exactly. You’re, you’re hitting a single here, right? You’re going to feel better, you’re going to feel more relaxed. You’re going to feel slightly more comfortable. It’s a, it should be a, a carve off of the ultimate product, right? So if the ultimate product is you’re, you’re giving somebody a package for stress relief or anxiety relief or whatever they want to call it, then it’s something to let them know, Hey, you know what?

You can do this and you’re actually the one doing it. I’m just showing you how. And here’s a small piece and it’s 10 bucks, which goes back to that community side of things. I meet so many other people that. In hypnosis, don’t want to record audio programs, don’t wanna put out products cuz the fear is if I have that, people won’t come to me anymore.

Huge mistake. Huge mistake. We learned, we learned that. I, uh, I will take credit for bringing that concept to our business. Mike and I have had a lot of conversations about it and. I think because he’s been ripped off at times in the past by other people. He’s, he’s been hesitant to want to give stuff away Now he completely buys into it.

And the two of us are just always thinking about how can we give away more stuff? And let, let me back up. Actually, No, let, let me just remind me to come back to this trip wire concept because you said, what was the big thing? What made a big difference for me? What was working now? And I want to come back to when you and I first met at the Traffic and Conversion Summit, and I walked away from that conference realizing that I needed to put a trip wire in place that would lead people towards our online hypnosis training.

And I did that. But before we do, let’s talk about the giving stuff away. So one of the products that Mike and I created a couple of years back is called the Wellness. And it’s not something we really advertise right now. And look at you pulling up the thing. That’s the next bullet point on my list. Oh, perfect.

Great. Okay, so this is because, and I sent you a video yesterday, right? Yeah. That’s great. And so this is all part of the theme of giving stuff away. So let’s imagine that somebody has come into our organization through the podcast, the Brain Software podcast, check it out on iTunes, or, um, let’s say they’ve opted into some sort of offer on our list.

So they’re now, they’re now getting emails from us, or maybe they’ve bought something from us. Maybe it’s a trip wire, $7 training, or maybe they’ve, uh, signed up for our online training, or maybe they’ve come to a live class. So whatever, It doesn’t matter. Once they kind of know us, then here’s what we wanna do.

We want to help them get more information and should they want to give us more money and do some training with us, that’s cool. But we just want to hand out a lot of good ammunition for people to solve their own problems. And so knowing that, I think the statistics are something like two thirds of the American population, and I’m sure it’s very similar in Canada, are either overweight or obese.

There’s a lot of people out there who would like to, The statistics are almost right on the thirds, Two thirds are overweight. And of those a third is obese. Yeah. It’s one third plus one third. Exactly. So I always just refer to it as two thirds are either overweight or obese. And this is not meant to be an insult.

This is just the clinical definition of, I can’t remember how they define it, but it’s defined somewhere. And that’s basically where the statistics come from, right? So it’s a measurement thing. I know a lot of people would like to attack that problem. And be stronger and happier and fitter and all that stuff.

So Mike and I both, just as you are, are people who live a healthy lifestyle and have learned from our own mistakes over the years and have learned what works and what doesn’t work, and not by doing it ourselves, but by, and I’ll go back to an example of, uh, let’s say me being an engineering student when I was in my second year of engineering studying thermodynamic.

Do you think the professor who was up at the front of the classroom teaching us about energy transfer or whatever it was, do you think he wrote the textbook? Of course not. Sometimes that happens, but almost always you get a textbook that is just the gold standard in teaching second year engineering students thermodynamics and you teach from that book.

So the professor has to understand the topic very well, but he didn’t write the. That’s cool. No problem. Right. So when it comes to wellness or anything else, we are not the guys who came up with the scientific information and did all the studies. We’re just taking information that we know works because we’ve learned it from other authorities and doing our job to teach it.

And we always credit the sources, but teaching is an important part of what any, um, Well, any good hypnotist should be able to do is to teach really well. So we put together this wellness academy to teach people what we learned and to incorporate. So two areas of expertise that are not traditionally our own, which is diet and activity.

So what you eat and how you move your body. And the third, which is in the area of an expertise for a hypnotist, and that is the mental game. So we, we position it as this acronym, D a m a dam, not the, not the, not the bad word, but the, the word that represents holding back water or holding what is holding back your wellness, diet, activity, mental game.

We can show you the mental game, We can show you the diet and activity parts to. So how do we sell it? Well, our new, we’re relaunching it. And here’s the way we’re doing it. We’re gonna put together a page, and on that page will be pretty much everything that you need to do to do this on your own. It’ll be a series of 10 or so different videos teaching one key concept in often an entertaining way, but always a very focused way that brings true science into the picture and is undeniably true.

So something that you can go and get an aha moment from on each video. Wow, I didn’t know that. Oh, that makes sense. Oh, this came from such and such an authority. Okay, So if our students can take that and implement it in their own lives, wonderful. No money changes hands, Thank you. Go have a better life and tell us how well it worked for you.

But for those who are interested in going further and wanting to be a part of our community where we have a private Facebook group and all that other stuff, right? And we deliver all the online training and it’s all very organized. Then here it is, it’s not very expensive and it’s there for your taking if you want it.

Right? So it’s a low pressure, It’s not even a tactic. It’s, it’s really about helping people, giving huge amounts of quality information upfront. Knowing that some people will say, cuz they’re already your customer, Okay, I want, I want in on this. What’s great about that is what I heard was make someone’s life better, whether they pay you or not.

Yeah. I don’t care if I honestly, you know, money is not the number one goal in my life and, uh, if it was, that would just make the business no fun at all. And, and to have it be the solution of, again, and this is perhaps credit back to the digital marketer gang, that, uh, to always let the sales message be themed around, how can I make that easier?

Exactly so I can give you all the steps. It, it’s where there’s a theme that, uh, before we wrap up in about 10 minutes time, cuz I got a client about to walk in the, the moment where I’d have people cautious around new ideas, you know, and whether it’s opening up an office or teaching us specific workshop to the general public, not just being the, um, you know, the, the trainer, but the experience of, but this person has already done something like that.

And honestly it’s where personal ran coming your way. Uh, there’s some dialogue that often would happen, you know, in, in different groups around. Oh, there’s nothing new out there. Oh, people are just repackaging the same ideas. And it’s where we find these are the themes that work. What have we talked about so far?

We’ve talked about building community, we’ve talked about building the relationship. We’ve talked about providing an outstanding value to somebody, whether they pay you or not. That ain’t new. Um, that’s, that’s been there even before the interwebs was there. Before. That’s it. Before Facebook. That’s live.

Ever covered it. . That’s why the What’s working now discussion really centers around the distribution method. Right. How are you distributing that sense of community? How are you fostering it? Well, okay, now we have Facebook Live and YouTube live broadcasting or Facebook groups or whatever it is. But it’s the same thing as you said, you know, holding a.

holding a mini seminar for free at your local library would be another good example of how that would’ve been done in the past. That specific, That’s example I, I’d have people go, Yeah, but there’s someone else in my area who has already done that and great. You know, it works. Exactly. Exactly. You know, it works.

And at the same time, you and I are probably people who have bought a lot of the same, you know, marketing products, some of the same hypnosis books over the years, and absolutely attended some of the same workshops even. And it’s where you don’t know is the instructor side, when that message is gonna be the right message for that individual where the opportunity meets with all the preparation and now it becomes the thing.

Right. As opposed to, Yeah. But you know, Mike Bandel also teaches classes online, so why would I do that? When the answer is, we don’t know that entry point for somebody. And to be that bridge, to get someone in. And how sometimes, you know, you mention the conflict that sometimes it is a location thing. They can’t make it to the live class.

So here’s a digital option. And where, you know, sometimes it’s the student who signs up for the class just because they’re right down the road. Mm-hmm. , they choose to work with this individual because their office is closer and that’s just as valid as experience. That’s just as valid. And sometimes it goes well and sometimes it doesn’t.

And then they do further research. But it’s that place of just taking action, putting this stuff out there, and just being willing to bring it back full circle. Being willing to test with all. Exactly. So let’s, let me get back to that trip wire thing that I wanted to talk about, because I think that’s an important one.

It made a huge difference for us. And so, as you remember, uh, when we met at the Digital marketer conference, the, the thing that came away, the thing that I came away with was this concept of splintering off. So what’s your core offer? Splinter a piece of that off as your trip wire. So your, um, your, uh, take 10.

Take. Tend to relax. Yeah, take tender. So that’s a good trip wire. That’s awesome. So we already had a tr, what I didn’t realize was a trip wire. We had this product back when I was thinking the old time way of thinking, you know, here’s A D V D that we put together with six inductions on it. It’s professionally filmed from two camera angles.

It’s wonderful. It’s a $97 product, right? And we even supplement it with a CD that gets bundled with it, where Mike and I, I interview Mike and I extract all these nuggets of knowledge out of these six wonderful inductions that are so professionally delivered on this dvd. And you get them both and it’s $97.

Well, back in that day, that was the, that was the product that we had. So we sold it for $97. Um, in fact, in those days when we first created it, we didn’t even have our online hypnosis training. We just realized, you know what, let’s put these induction on dvd. We’ll sell them for 97 bucks. It’ll be good supplemental income.

So, Fast forward, go to a digital marketer conference and realize the concept of a trip wire, and the aha moment for me was holy beep, right . I could take this DVD and turn it into an online course and make it absurdly cheap, like seven bucks. And so we started doing that. We created a tutorial that people could opt into.

So they give us their name and their email, and we give them a really good 10 minute tutorial on how rapid and instant inductions work. And we, there’s, I won’t go into it here, but obviously we differentiate between a rapid induction and an instant induction. And the tutorial explains what those differences are, how they work mechanically, how they work, um, neurologically, et cetera.

And then of course, at the end of that tutorial, we say, Hey, like, would you like to learn six of these? It’s seven bucks. So a lot of people go, Wow, that’s, that’s a no brainer. That sounds really good. And of course, because they first experience as a customer at that point, it’s like the first date, right? If your first date is awesome, you want to go on another, So when we give somebody a training that legitimately was sold for $97 for years and years, and now it’s delivered online and we’ve beefed it up so it’s even better, and we added transcripts and all that stuff, and people get this amazing experience for their first seven bucks, they go, Well, okay, if it’s that good, I wonder how their online training is.

And you know, the rest is history. So making that quick change, just saying, Ah, instead of trying to sell our online training directly, we should lead in with this very discounted offer on something that is amazing to give people a great experience. And if all they do is, is hand over their seven bucks, learn these amazing trainings and never come back, wonderful, no problem.

They’re gonna be a better hypnotist as a result of it. And if they join us and they join our community, that’s great too. Right? So that made a huge difference for me. And I think any hypnotist running any kind of, um, business, you know, seeing clients can do the same thing. Your take tend to relax is a great example.

Another way to think of a trip wire is anything where they trade a substantial investment in their own time. So attending a free presentation at a local library that’s a trip wire. You’re not getting any money for it, but they’re investing in you. They’re building a relationship with you, and you can make them an offer after that, which again, I wanna make sure people don’t play the game of, but that’s not gonna work for me because I don’t have a product yet.

That’s not gonna work for me because I’m not an instructor. It, it could be the audio program like I have, it could be tonight in my office. I’m running a work. , that’s actually just about the progressive muscle relaxation induction, uh, that I’m running and looking at the meetup attendance. Some of them are local hypnotists, some of them are people interested in hypnosis.

But also there’s people who I know are coming tonight that perhaps, you know, the phrase is they shouldn’t be in the classroom yet. They should be in the chair in the office. And that’s what their intention is cuz they just wanna learn more. Yeah. Which again, back to that statement a while ago, make someone’s life better, whether they pay you or.

Exactly. And I know you’re running short on time here, so I won’t belabor the point, but that is exactly why I was mentioning libraries, presentations, whatever. Because if you are a hypnotist seeing clients and you wanna see more clients, you don’t need to be a hypnosis trainer with online training, et cetera.

All you’re looking to do is take one piece of what you do. So maybe it’s that you’re really good at showing your clients how to go into trance on their own i e self hypnosis, so that when they go home, they can use these techniques over and over again without having to come to your office and keep paying you.

Cause that’s, that’s the ultimate, being able to teach people to help themselves. Well, if you do a seminar on showing people how to relax, how to get into a self hypnotic trance. For whatever purpose. You’re not gonna have time, obviously, in a seminar to teach them how to quit smoking, how to lose weight, how to kill those phobias, whatever it is.

But if they believe that they’ve got something useful from you because they have in that free presentation or online cheap course that you delivered, they will come back for more. So one more question. What excites you at this point? Um, I think what I’m most excited about is the continue. Well, it’s this long process of transitioning all the products that we used to consider are core products into trip wires, and not just growing our training business in terms of online hypnosis training, but all of the people who are coming in through our podcast because they’re mostly interested in personal development.

I’ve started to segment people as they joined our email list and ask them just a simple question, Are you here because you’re more interested in learning hypnosis or learning about personal development? And I think that’s gonna guide how I invest some of our product development and marketing dollars, because there are a ton of people who will be fascinated by this topic, but they don’t actually wanna learn hypnosis.

They wanna learn how to fix themselves. And that’s cool. And that’s a definite market that we should all be. And to bring that full circle even to working with clients. It’s where very often they’re calling because of something they don’t want anymore. They don’t want to quit smoking. They don’t want to be a smoker.

They don’t want to be overweight. They don’t want to have the fear and for your techniques to focus more on what do they want, what direction can they, Now, Jason, you’re you, you’re bringing up, and, and this is an amazing thing, that everybody who’s a therapist, hypnotist, coach, could teach as a trip wire concept or lead magnet generator.

And that is present state versus target state. Present state is problem state. I don’t wanna be a smoker anymore. Well, what do you want? I want to be, Well, don’t tell me non-smoker. Tell me, you know, something more meaningful than that. I want to be a healthy person. Okay, now I know what the target state is.

Now we can go after it with empowering questions, resources, et cetera. If all you do is teach every person who visits your website how to think like that, and they get an aha moment out of it, do you think your conversion rate to, to bring clients into your office might go up? Absolutely. Absolutely. So where can people find you online?

They can find [email protected], which is our, our obviously our, our main business. Um, I, I think that’s really the best place. I, I don’t have a, a big presence myself in terms of Facebook and all that Twitter and stuff like that. Um, it’s Mike and I are a team. Mike Mandel hypnosis.com Brain Software podcast on iTunes.

Yeah, we’ll put that on the show notes over at Work Smart Hypnosis as well. And subscribe to that. Listen to that, Chris. It’s, it’s about time we did. Yes, it’s been, yeah, it’s been a long time in the planning, so I’m glad we did it. It was a lot of fun. Awesome.

Jason Ette here once again, and as always, thank you so much for your interaction with this program, your feedback, your reviews online, your sharing of this content online as well. And I’d encourage you as well to take this as a moment to not just work in your business, but also work on your business as the mindset and as the strategies are in the right place.

It allows the platforms when they’re properly formed to work for you. And that’s what I’ve done for you inside of hypnotic business systems. This is the all access pass to my digital library of strategies to help you to grow your business, whether you’re a hypnotherapist, whether you’re an unconscious coach, whether you’re a stage hypnotist, to take that ability and have.

Real workshop strategies that you can model and put into place right away to help you to grow your business. There’s everything from Done for You campaigns that you can just model and plug in as they are, as well as screenshot tutorials to help you to overcome that learning curve of all things technical or even the actual strategies that I have used to work with a digital team of outsourcers to duplicate myself and go home at the end of the day and have someone else, the other side of the world do the work for me.

Get this all right away for just $47 hypnotic business systems.com. See you soon. Thanks for listening to the Work Smart Hypnosis Podcast and work smart hypnosis.com.